




historic 

Summer 

y AUNTS 

FROM 

'EWPORT 



PORTLAND 

F. LAUILISTON 




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COPVRIGHT DKPOSIE 



HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 
FROM NEWPORT TO PORTLAND 




A Picturesque Bit of Gloucester Harbor 



HISTORIC 
SUMMER HAUNTS 



FROM 



Newport to Portland 



BY 
F. LAURISTON BULLARD 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY 
LOUIS H. RUYL 



BOSTON 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 

1912 






Copyright, igi2, 
By Little, Brown, and Company. 

All rights reserved 
Published, September, 191 2 



THE COLONIAL PRESS 
C. H. BIMONDS & CO., BOSTON, U. 8. A 



CCU320551 
4<<? / 



TO 

C. E. B. 



PREFACE 

*' Happy he whom neither wealth nor fashion, 
Nor the march of the encroaching city, 

Drives an exile 
From the hearth of his ancestral homestead. 

" We may build more splendid habitations. 
Fill our rooms with paintings and with sculptures, 

But we cannot 
Buy with gold the old associations! " 

Out of an enduring affection for " the old associa- 
tions " of which the New England poet writes, this 
volume has been prepared by the author and the illus- 
trator. The point of view is that of one who, after 
years in one of the centres of population to which " the 
expansion of New England " has taken the descend- 
ants of the Puritans, found himself at last in the midst 
of the " ancestral homesteads " from which he had 
been " exiled." The opportunities for patient contem- 
plation and study of the historic and picturesque towns 
of the New England coast were hailed with a satisfac- 
tion which has deepened as acquaintance has become 
more and more intimate. 

For information supplied thanks are due to Samuel 



viii PREFACE 

T. Pickafd, the biographer of Whittier ; to Edith May 
Tilley, librarian of the Newport Historical Society; 
to Mrs. Sarah E. Gregory and Benjamin B. Lindsay of 
Marblehead; to Alfred A. Ordway of Haverhill; to 
Fred W. Tibbetts of Gloucester, and to Dr. Fred S. 
Piper of Lexington. Grateful acknowledgment is 
made to George Ernest Bowman, of the Society of 
Mayflower Descendants of Massachusetts, and the 
discoverer of the only contemporaneous tomb of a 
Majrflower passenger; to George Francis Dow, secre- 
tary of the Essex Institute; to the Rev. Horace C. 
Hovey; to Nathan Goold, librarian of the Maine His- 
torical Society; and to Lewis W, Brewster of Ports- 
mouth, who very kindly have read the proofs of the 
chapters devoted respectively to Plymouth, Salem, 
Newbury port, Portland and Portsmouth. Thanks are 
rendered also to Houghton, Mifflin and Company, who 
gave courteous permission to quote from the works 
of Emerson, Hawthorne, Holmes, Longfellow, Sted- 
man, Whittier and Pickard; to Harper and Brothers 
for permission to quote from Thomas Bailey Aldrich 
and George William Curtis ; and to the Century Com- 
pany for citations from Julian Hawthorne. 

F. Lauriston Bullard. 
August, 191 2. 



. CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Preface vii 

I. Newport i 

II. Plymouth ^ - 33 

III. QUINCY 54 

IV. Lexington 79 

V. Concord • • 93 

VI. The WAYsmE Inn 123 

VII. Marblehead 133 

VIII. Gloucester 160 

DC. Salem 179 

X. The Whittier Country 216 

XI. Newburyport 237 

XII. Portsmouth . 269 

Xni Portland 299 

Index , . 321 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

"A Picturesque Bit of Gloucester Harbor Frontispiece 

PAGE 

The Old Stone Mill 7 

'The Old State House, Newport iS 

■The Old Burial Hill, Plymouth 34 

-Site of the First House of the Colony, Leyden 

Street, Plymouth 40 

-The Homes of John Adams and John Quincy Adams, 

QuiNCY 58 

The Dorothy Q. House, Quincy 73 

Church and Monument, Lexington Common . . 84 

The Hancock - Clarke House, Lexington ... 90 

The Old Bridge, Concord gS 

The Old Manse, Concord 103 

■Ralph Waldo Emerson House, Concord . . .110 

The Orchard House, Concord 114 

The Wayside Inn 124 

Washington Street and Town Hall, Marblehead . 136 

The Old Burial Hill, Marblehead .... 140 
-The Old Powder House, Marblehead . . . .152 

"The Lee Mansion, Marblehead 156 

Gloucester from the Harbor 162 

'The Custom House, Salem 182 

-Hawthorne's Birthplace, Salem 198 



xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

The House of the Seven Gables, Salem , . . 203 

'Doorway of the Salem Club 211 

'Whittier Birthplace, Haverhill 218 

-Tttk Old Spiller Garrison House, Haverhill . . 225 

-Pulpit of the Old South Church, Newburyport . 251 

Tlsey House; 1670. Newbury 262 

A Bit of the Portsmouth Water Front . . .273 

^Pleasant Street, Portsmouth 288 

Longfellow's Birthplace, Portland .... 304 

The Chadwick Mansion, Portland .... 309 

The Wadsworth - Longfellow House, Portland . 313 



Historic Summer Haunts 

From Newport to Portland 
NEWPORT 

" From that far island in the midland sea, 
Where Rhodian art wrought out the world's surprise, 
Did our own Eden island's name arise, 
And then, at last, the state's it grew to be." 

— Charlotte Fiske Bates. 

The Isle of Peace is not large, reaching fifteen miles 
down the blue waters of Narragansett Bay from the 
mainland at Bristol, where the HerreshofTs built the 
boats that kept the cup, to the cliffs upon which the 
sea dashes in splendid surfs that frame the shore in 
shining foam; the town of Newport is not big, with its 
few thousands of permanent residents; but nowhere 
else in America do romance, beauty and fashion so 
combine and conspire to win the affections and to 
dazzle the imagination. 

What the island and the town are to-day, that they 
have been through nearly all their history. Not only in 
the fifty years which have seen the building of the pal- 
aces which give the Cliff Walk a sky-line as impressive 
in its way as that of lower Manhattan Island has New- 
port been the resort of fashion. In the old days of com- 



2 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

parative poverty, when there were no Bellevue Avenue, 
no Ocean Drive and no yachting rendezvous, society 
came to enjoy what George William Curtis called " the 
Mediterranean days of Newport with their luxurious 
languor of the South." In the times of saddle-horse 
and chaise Boston people used to make the two days' 
trip to attend the Newport theatre. Long before the 
Revolution, when Newport's commerce exceeded that 
of New York, English households were coming from 
Jamaica and Antigua to Rhode Island, and wealthy 
families of the Southern Colonies were sailing for 
Aquidneck from Savannah, Charleston and Richmond. 
Newport's merchants, with scarlet coats and powdered 
hair, elaborate in manner and liberal in expenditure, 
dispensed generous hospitality. Rhode Island women 
in brocades and patches found the chief expression of 
their grace in the dancing of the minuet. 

The fame of the town crossed the ocean. Foreigners 
of distinction came to test its reputation for munifi- 
cent entertaining. Having a library second in America 
only to that of Harvard, and educating carefully its 
boys and girls, Newport was able to boast of the cul- 
ture of its people as well as of their looks and blood. 
" The chosen resort of the rich and philosophic from 
all parts of the civilized world," — that Newport 
was pronounced to be, even in the time of its greatest 
depression, by Dr. Waterhouse, writing in the Boston 
Intelligencer. 

The Revolution left Newport desolate. But the 



NEWPORT 3 

nation was still very young when Southern planters 
again began to make the voyage to the Peaceful Isle 
in their own vessels with their horses and servants, 
and nearly ten years before the Civil War the 
Newport of to-day was started by twelve owners of 
" cottages " — four from Boston and eight from New 
York — who came to the island for the summer. 
With such intermissions as that made by the War for 
Independence, Newport has always bathed and dined 
and danced, only to-day the setting of the play is more 
magnificent. In the stately days of the old regime, 
Newport was as elegant, and perhaps more dignified, 
than is she in the opulent present. The polo field has 
superseded the bowling green. The automobile has 
replaced the equipages that carried the belles of the 
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The villas of 
to-day are made of marble, so perched upon the heights 
or fitted into the hollows as to seem almost a part of 
nature itself. But the first of the mansions that gave 
Newport her fame was the four-chimneyed house, one 
hundred and fifty feet square, built by WiUiam Bren- 
ton more than two hundred and fifty years ago. 

Both the island and the town in simimer and winter 
alike charm the imaginative visitor by their odd mixing 
of the old with the new, and by the stories which his- 
tory and tradition associate with the wharves and 
streets and quaint doorways. Of the Old Stone Mill 
Thomas Wentworth Higginson said: "It is the only 
thing on the Atlantic shore which has had time to for- 



4 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

get its birthday." In Newport both the Quaker and 
the Jew found a haven of rest from persecution, and 
the beautiful endowed Hebrew cemetery at the foot of 
Bellevue Avenue is the testimonial of the gratitude of 
one of these fugitive peoples. 

Long Wharf can hardly be matched in America. It 
must have been a goodly sight when Washington and 
Rochambeau walked its length between the files of 
French soldiers. 

" 'Twas the month of March and the air was chill, 
But bareheaded over Aquidneck hill 
Guest and host they took their way, 
While on either side was the grand array 

" Of a gallant army, French and fine, 
Ranged three deep in a glittering line; 
And the French fleet sent a welcome roar 
Of a hundred guns from Canonicut shore. 

" And the bells rang out from every steeple. 
And from street to street the Newport people 
Followed and cheered, with a hearty zest, 
De Rochambeau and his honored guest." 

Upon this wharf landed Bishop Berkeley and his 
bride upon their strange mission to Bermuda, and there 
they were met by Trinity's " wardens, vestry, church 
and congregation headed by their rector." 

Quite removed from the summer life of fashion is 
the Point, ministering to such vacation himters as 



NEWPORT 5 

would read and paint and sail, where in the days of 
the French occupation were quartered many of the 
officers of Rochambeau. From a house on the Point 
came the funeral procession of Admiral de Temay, 
all the officers of the army and fleet marching on foot, 
headed by nine chanting priests, the coffin covered by 
a velvet pall and carried by eight sailors, a scene that 
qmte astounded the Quakers of the town. 

In the streets that twist up the hill from the water- 
front there are many gambrels and gables that might 
tell tales of Peggy Champlin, the belle with whom 
Washington opened the ball in Mrs. Cowley's Assem- 
bly Room; of Polly Lawton, the Quakeress whose 
beauty was described by the Comte de Segur ; and per- 
haps of yoimg Fersen, the aide-de-camp who was to 
ride with Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. the night of 
their flight to Varennes. Thames Street has the mellow 
look of age ; sidewise to it stands the old house in which 
Oliver Hazard Perry was married, from which he 
started to Lake Erie, and to whose door he was brought 
as a hero by a hurrahing crowd, upon his return. From 
the balcony of the old State House, whence was pro- 
claimed the death of George II. and the accession of 
George III., proclamations were made almost to this 
day of the election of the successive governors of Rhode 
Island. 

The first gun at Lexington was the knell of the port 
whose docks, a mile in length, were thronged with 
thousands of sailors. Cooper, in The Red Rover, refers 



6 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

to Newport as a future metropolis. And if negroes 
were for many years among the chief commodities of 
trade, let the words of Mrs. Stowe in her novel of the 
old town be remembered: " What shall a man do with 
a most sublime tier of moral faculties when the most 
profitable business out of his port is the slave trade? " 

The Indians gave the island its pretty name, Aquid- 
neck, the Isle of Peace. From some resemblance of its 
bland climate to that of the Isle of Rhodes it may have 
received from the white man the name Rhode Island. 
It is ridged with hills that imdulate back from the sea. 
Farms and orchards cover the highlands farthest 
from the coast. The island is studded with windmills, 
one of which, with eight, big, whirling sails, is novel and 
especially picturesque. The coast is not friendly. The 
cliffs are the highest between Cape Ann and Yucatan, 
and beyond them the waves are shivered into foam by 
the hidden ledge called Brenton's Reef. There is 
plenty of savor in the salt of the air. The atmosphere 
is moist, and a delicate veil of mist hangs over the 
island, blown about by the sea winds, and producing 
effects of color and change that have caught the fancy 
of many an artist. 

The city — for so Newport likes to call herself — 
varies her appeal to suit the taste of all visitors. There 
are the avenue and the drive, the Cliff Walk and the 
scenery which shimmers in the misty air, the harbor 
full of yachts, the forts and the torpedo station, and 
the lighthouse in which Ida Lewis made her home for 




The Old Stone Mill 



NEWPORT 7 

many years. But to many the chief charm of Newport 
will be the realization of the romantic and historic as 
actual Hving presences, pervading the whole place^ 
brooding over the glittering present from the old houses, 
looking on calmly and undisturbed at all that wealth 
has wrought of luxury and display. The synagogue 
and the State House, the Wanton house and the Red- 
wood Library have seen the pomp of other generations 
bloom and decay. In Newport, if anyivhere in Amer- 
ica, the Past seems to contemplate with stately dig- 
nity the vanities of the Present. The mind runs to 
history in Newport as naturally as to shoes in Lynn or 
to textiles in Fall River. 

In one of those stinny and silent squares which no 
number of romping children can make into a noisy 
public resort stands the Old Stone Mill, with the bronze 
statue of one of the country's heroes of war upon the 
one hand and the bronze figure of one of her great ad- 
vocates of peace upon the other. No structure in the 
United States has been more discussed. Scholars have 
written disquisitions upon it. Poets have woven verses 
about it, and wags have made it the basis for clever 
hoaxes. Some reprobate once started the story that 
it was to be turned into an imibrella factory. By all 
means stroll to the mill by way of the narrow and irregu- 
lar street that climbs the hill, rather than from the 
fashionable boulevard that bounds the square upon 
the opposite side. There it stands, sphinxlike, with its 
air of impenetrable mystery. It is a gray and time- 



8 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

worn tower, whose walls once were almost concealed 
by the ivy and trumpet vines which had to come down 
when it was found that they were disintegrating the 
mortar which had been a subject of international ar- 
gument. The roof is gone, the floors and all the wood- 
work. On a brilliant moonUght night it is an enticing 
vision; then one is willing to agree to the most fan- 
tastic tale that ever has been told of it. 

Who built it? It has been pronounced a most per- 
fect specimen of early Norman architecture, owing its 
origin to the rovers who followed Leif Ericson. Dis- 
tinguished architects have traced its resemblance to 
the religious structures built by the wandering Vikings 
in various parts of Europe, and have found it to be a 
counterpart of the Baptistery at Asti. One writer has 
offered the theory that it was erected as a pharos by 
the crew of some shipwrecked vessel. 

On a July day some time you may lean against the 
iron fence which surroimds it and pensively contem- 
plate the ruin, when a long-bearded man who has been 
sitting upon a bench near at hand wiU be likely to ap- 
proach you. 

" I can give you a fine lecture on that tower," he 
wiU say. 

" Do you know who built it? " you ask. 

"I do," and the old guide, without waiting for the 
promise of a fee, will start upon a long monologue, 
unconscious that he himself is an interesting antiquity. 
But, almost against your will, you are obliged to agree 



NEWPORT 9 

that he advocates the most probable theory of its ori- 
gin. It is so sensible a theory that no one of course 
could be expected to accept it. For very probably the 
tower was built by Governor Benedict Arnold in the 
seventeenth century as a windmill, after an English 
model. In his will, dated 1677, the governor makes 
mention of his " stone built mill." 

This is the Arnold who followed Roger Williams as 
governor of the colony. His son was '' Benedict of 
Newport, gentleman; " his grandson was " Benedict 
of Newport, cooper; " his great-grandson was " Bene- 
dict of Norwich and New Haven, cooper and trader; " 
and his great-great-grandson was " Benedict of Nor- 
wich and New Haven, druggist, soldier of the Conti- 
nental army, and — traitor!" 

But, whether built for grinding com or not, the 
charming story which Longfellow put into verse wiU 
always be associated with the Old Tower. 

" There for my lady's bower 
Built I the lofty tower. 
Which, to this very hour, 
Stands looking seaward." 

Across Mill Street from the tower, behind its two- 
leaved gate with high posts and cross-bar, stands the 
Gibbs mansion, built before 1770, a fine old house, with 
a wide hall running from front to rear, a spiral stair- 
case, and several rooms wainscoted to the ceiling. 
During the brief time that he was in Newport, General 



10 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

Nathanael Greene occupied the house, and there he 
received the visits of Lafayette, Kosciusko and Baron 
Steuben. 

The bronze figure of WiUiam Ellery Channing faces 
the Channing Memorial Church with hands lifted as in 
benediction. The great preacher was bom in an old 
square house at the comer of School and Mary Streets. 
At the beach he fed his appetite for beauty and in the 
Redwood Library he satisfied his thirst for knowledge. 
The town is full of stories of his filial devotion and his 
pulpit eloquence. His school fellows called him " the 
Peacemaker." Washington AUston, the artist, went 
to school in Newport and married Channing's sister, 
falling almost as deeply in love with the brother as with 
the girl who became his bride. 

J. Q. A. Ward's memorial to Commodore Matthew 
Calbraith Perry is at the Bellevue Avenue end of the 
square. The bas-reHefs on the pedestal depict scenes 
in Perry's career in Africa, Mexico, and upon the fa- 
mous mission to Japan. 

Touro Park, the square is called, for that eccentric, 
great-hearted Jew, Judah Touro, who left the town 
ten thousand dollars for its purchase in 1854. Stroll 
past the library for the time and in a few minutes you 
reach the little Jewish cemetery, which is one of the 
ornaments of the city, and a turn down the hill brings 
you to the synagogue of the oldest Jewish congregation 
in America. 

The synagogue occupies its ancient site in Touro 



NEWPORT 11 

Street. The congregation Salvation of Israel was or- 
ganized in 1680. From time to time the Hebrew colony- 
received accessions from the West Indies and Portu- 
gal. Valuable trade secrets came with these Jews, 
many of whom were men of liberal culture. Their 
quiet fidelity to their ancient ritual gained them the 
respect of their Gentile neighbors. Their synagogue 
was dedicated in the last month of 1763. It looks due 
south, regardless of the oblique angle which it makes 
with the street. The scrolls of the law deposited in 
the ark in the eastern waU were carefully brought from 
Europe; one of them, now four hundred years old, 
was imported by the Jews who reached the island in 
1658. When the British troops occupied Newport, the 
Jews, ardent supporters of the American cause, were 
forced to flee. The synagogue was closed and for al- 
most a century it was quite deserted. But it was kept 
in repair, and by an agreement with the trustees of its 
large fimds a congregation of German Jews reopened 
the synagogue less than twenty years ago. 

The Rev. Isaac Touro was the first minister to serve 
in this ancient building. His two sons, Abraham and 
Judah, were successful in business and generous in 
giving. Judah removed to New Orleans in 1803, where 
he amassed a huge fortune, only to meet with heavy- 
losses in the War of 18 12. Upon his death in 1854, his 
body was brought to Newport for burial, for, although 
the Revolution had dispersed the Jews to all the chief 
cities of the Colonies, a few of the race met from time 



12 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

to time to celebrate a marriage in the old synagogue, and 
to their cemetery they reverently brought back their 
dead and laid them beside the ashes of their forefathers. 

Right well worth telling are many of the stories 
connected with the careers of these Newport Hebrews. 
There was Aaron Lopez, who came to America about 
1746 and soon had sailing the seas some thirty square- 
riggers. There were the Meyer, the Seixas, and the 
Pollock families. And there was Jacob Rodriquez 
Riviera, who was called " the honest man," and for 
this reason: a series of losses compelled him to sus- 
pend payment. His English friends offered him credit 
with plenty of goods. To take advantage of the ofter 
he was forced to find refuge in the Insolvent Act. Suc- 
cess came to him anew. After some years he invited 
all his American creditors to dinner, and each guest 
found at his plate a check for the entire amount due 
him, principal and interest. 

Up the hill from the synagogue, at the foot of Belle- 
vue Avenue, is the cemetery which dates back to a 
deed in the city clerk's office, which shows that in 1677 
a lot was purchased "for a burial place for Jews." 
Crowds of summer folk scurry through the avenue with 
but a careless glance at the quiet nook where, behind 
locked gates, deep in flowers and under the shadow of 
cypresses, lie the bones of the old Hebrews of Rhode 
Island. Over the heavy granite gateway is carved in 
relief a winged globe, and on the supporting pillars 
inverted torches. An iron and stone fence encloses two 



NEWPORT 13 

sides of the little burial plot and a vine-covered wall 
the other two. Obelisks of granite make the corner 
posts on the avenue front. When Abraham Touro 
was killed in an accident in Boston, he left ten thousand 
dollars for the synagogue and cemetery and five thou- 
sand dollars to keep the street to them in order. His 
brother's will provided twelve thousand dollars for 
the present granite and iron fence and for a monument 
to his father and mother. The fence needs no repairs 
and the income of the earlier gift is used to provide 
flowers for the enclosure. 

Pause here for a time and look through the fence at 
the columns and slabs with their Hebrew inscriptions. 
Think a bit of the ample return which Newport has 
reaped from the tolerance she gave the race which had 
been hounded for centuries in almost every country 
of the Old Worid. 

" How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves 
Close by the street of this fair sea-port town, 
Silent beside the never-silent waves, 
At rest in all this moving up and down. 

" And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown, 
That pave with level flags their burial-place. 
Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown down 
And broken by Moses at the mountain's base. 

" The very names recorded here are strange, 
Of foreign accent, and of different climes; 
Alvares and Riviera interchange 
With Abraham and Jacob of old times." 



14 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

To the Redwood Library Judah Touro made a gift 
of two thousand dollars for a portico. The finest fern- 
leafed beech on the island is a treasure in which the 
library rejoices, as well as in its collection of books and 
its gallery of portraits. The beautiful Doric building 
was designed by Peter Harrison, the assistant to Van- 
brugh in the erection of Marlborough's palace at Blen- 
heim. The stack room was added in 1875. Needed 
' badly is a suitable room for the exhibition of the paint- 
ings by Sully, Peale, Stuart, and many other artists, 
which are owned by the library. The nucleus of these 
collections was made when a philosophical society was 
organized and Abraham Redwood, an old Quaker, gave 
five hundred pounds for books. The land, formerly 
the " bowling green," was given by Henry Collins, a 
patron of art once called the Lorenzo de Medici of 
Rhode Island. The first annual meeting of the Ubrary 
company was held in 1747. The library suffered at 
the destroying hands of the British until the Tories 
themselves protested. 

The portrait collection, formed on no settled plan, 
includes likenesses of early governors and Revolution- 
ary belles, of patriots and presidents. There are a por- 
trait from life of Lafayette by Charles B. King; a por- 
trait of John Howard Payne ; an example of the work of 
Sir Thomas Lawrence ; and a portrait of the Rev. John 
Callender, whose century sermon, the first history of 
Rhode Island, was preached in the building now used as 
a museum by the Historical Society, the old Seventh 



'^f^7^^ 




The Old State House, Neivport 



NEWPORT 15 

Day Baptist Church, erected in 1 729. Hung among the 
books also are the Indian chief portraits, a collection 
of unique value, picturing Red Jacket, Black Hawk, 
and a score of others. As interesting to many even as 
the picture of the young Gilbert Stuart painted by him- 
self, the fine FrankHn, and many others in this valuable 
gallery, are the portraits of Judah Touro and of Polly 
Lawton, the Quaker girl whom De Segur thus de- 
scribed : 

"... a being who resembled a n5anph rather than a woman 
entered the apartment. So much beauty, so much simplicity, 
so much elegance, and so much modesty were, perhaps, never 
combined in the same person. Her gown was white, while her 
ample muslin neckerchief, and the envious muslin of her cap, 
which scarcely allowed me to see her Ught-colored hair, seemed 
vainly to endeavor to conceal the most graceful figure imagi- 
nable. Her eyes appeared to reflect as in a mirror the meekness 
and purity of her mind. . . . Certain it is that if I had not been 
married and happy, I should, whilst coming to defend the lib- 
erty of the Americans, have lost my own at the feet of Polly 
Lawton." 

Washington Square, with the Mall which once was 
Queen Street, is a center about which are grouped vari- 
ous others of Newport's historic buildings. Many a 
stirring scene has been witnessed by the State House 
which fronts the square and what was called by the 
French Congress Street and by the British the Grand 
Parade. This structure, authorized as a court-house 
in 1739, is a monument to the taste of the men who 
designed it and to the good workmanship of the me- 



16 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

chanics who put it together. It suffered sadly during 
the war and was restored faithfully as soon as inde- 
pendence had been won. It is built of brick and stone, 
with broad steps ascending to the main floor upon three 
sides. Over the west front is the balcony from which 
the proclamations were made. That Rev. Ezra Stiles 
who became president of Yale and aspired to be a uni- 
versal scholar preached from it the funeral sermon of 
George II. Major John Handy read the Declaration 
of Independence from the steps of this old building in 
1776, and fifty years later again read the docimient 
from the same place. When the Gas pee was burned, 
four years before the Declaration, the commissioners 
held their inquiry into that act of insubordination in 
this court-house. In 1783 the people crowded thither 
to celebrate the coming of peace. Late in 1813 all New- 
port thronged to the building again, to vent their pride 
in Commodore Perry, just back from Put-in-Bay. His 
statue is in the square below, with the famous 
legend: "We have met the enemy and they are 
ours." 

In the Senate Chamber hangs Newport's most prized 
painting, a full-length Washington by Gilbert Stuart. 
The Representatives Chamber has been changed some- 
what, but the Senate has still its old wainscot and its 
fine staircase. Now that Newport is no longer a capital 
of the State, the building is practically a museum of 
historic relics. Upon occasion visitors are piloted to 
the attic to see the pillory. Washington and Jefferson, 



NEWPORT 17 

as President and Secretary of State respectively, were 
dined in the building in 1790, and Adams, Jackson, 
Fillmore and other Presidents have been officially 
entertained there. 

The streets about the square twist in devious ways. 
They have a sort of coaxing, coquettish air which in 
itself is an invitation to explore. Just a few steps from 
the State House is the tiny square in Marlborough 
Street. Stumbling upon it so promptly, you smile with 
gratification that so short a search has yielded so pleas- 
ing a find. And there, across the square, seeming to 
brood over it and over you as you look at it, stands the 
old Nicholls house, once the White Horse Tavern. In 
Marlborough Street is the old jail, with its legend of 
the prisoner who complained that it was not fitting 
for him to be confined behind a door which had no 
lock. 

A few rods off Broadway, looking old and rather de- 
jected, is the Wanton house. Recently it has been 
made empty by death. The street cars rumble past it 
with modem indifference. This aged colonial build- 
ing was owned and occupied by that merchant son of 
Governor Gideon Wanton who married first one of the 
three Robinson sisters who were the Quaker belles of 
the Revolutionary period. American and French offi- 
cers frequented this home in what then was called 
Broad Street, and there Major Daniel Lyman and 
Mary Wanton fell in love with each other at sight. 
She was very young and very handsome and her love 



18 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

letters prove her accomplishments. In time he became 
a chief justice of the State. One of his daughters mar- 
ried Benjamin Hazard and lived and died in this old 
house. And two of the granddaughters Hved many 
years therein, cherishing the well-known miniature 
painted by Malbone of their grandmother. 

To mention the name of Edward G. Malbone is to 
recall another romantic chapter in Newport's history. 
Malbone and Washington Allston were youthful friends 
when they were fellow pupils of Samuel King. Allston 
went from Newport to Harvard and with Malbone 
crossed the Atlantic. Summer after summer Malbone 
came to Newport, and his death occurred at Savannah 
in 1807 when he was on his way north. Many of his 
miniatures are to be seen in the town. He painted the 
Miss Montaudevert who married that young naval 
officer whose dying words were: " Don't give up the 
ship." Peggy Champlin was another of his subjects. 
Treasured as heirlooms, these dainty portraits are 
found set in heavy lockets, imbedded in the covers of 
jewel boxes, and framed sometimes in simple gold 
rims and sometimes ringed about with pearls and gar- 
nets. 

The second wife of John Wanton was Mary Bull, the 
granddaughter of that Governor Henry Bull who built 
the oldest surviving house in Rhode Island. It has. 
been removed from its original site and stands a few 
steps from the Wanton house, bearing this tab- 
let: 



NEWPORT 19 

" The Governor Bull House 
The Oldest House in Rhode Island 
Built in part in 1639 by 
Henry Bull 
Governor under the Royal 
Charter of the Colony of 
Rhode Island and Providence 

Plantations 
In the years 1685-86 and 1690. 



Erected by tjie State of Rhode Island 
1906" 

Another tablet which every visitor will wish to read 
recalls the whole romantic story of the French occupa- 
tion. The tablet is of bronze and bears in relief the 
likeness of Rochambeau with these lines: 

" Headquarters 

of General 

Count de Rochambeau 

Commanding 

The French Allied Forces." 

To find this house you turn off Touro Street into 
what once was called Mary Lane but now is Mary 
Street; and at the comer of Clarke Street is the fine 
colonial home of William Vernon, a merchant prince 
who traded with all the maritime countries of Europe. 
His patriotism cost him fully twelve thousand pounds 
and his Newport estate. His brother Thomas, the 
royal postmaster, was as devoted a Tory, and the pa- 
triots banished him from the town. 



20 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

The handsome Young Men's Christian Association 
building across the street replaces the mansion in which 
the Champlins lived. The story goes that Christopher 
Grant Champlin used to stand at the stable, his horse 
ready saddled, while his groom kept watch in the 
street. When the servant signaled, the master leaped 
to his seat and dashed out at headlong speed, but never 
quite fast enough to intercept Martha Redwood EUery, 
the granddaughter of Abraham Redwood, as she came 
tearing up Thames Street. But usually he caught up 
with her, and in 1792 they were married. This is the 
Champlin who in Paris heard Mirabeau pronoimce his 
eulogy of Franklin. 

The six aides of the French commander, Fersen 
among them, were quartered near the count. Of the 
others, : Quartermaster- General de Bevill lodged in 
Moses Levi's house on the Mall, the house occupied 
by Oliver Hazard Perry in later times. The gayest of 
the gay young Frenchmen was the Duke de Lauzim 
and he was welcomed in the home of Mrs. Deborah 
Hunter in Thames Street. Baron de Viomenil was at 
the house of Joseph Wanton in the same street. The 
Chevalier de Chastellux, whose book on his American 
travels is an authority consulted by all historians, was 
quartered in Spring Street. What a list of resounding 
names the roll makes, to be sure. 

" The Point " was the favorite residence for the offi- 
cers of the fleet. Walking out what was Water Street 
in 1780 and now is called Washington Street, you will 



NEWPORT 21 

pass house after house in which courtly foreigners once 
had their homes. From the windows they could over- 
look their ships, and their boats could land them at the 
little piers at the foot of the gardens. Somewhat in- 
accessible nowadays, this street is one of the most 
charming in all Newport. Dentilated pediments and 
pilastered doorways are common here. In one of the 
most celebrated of these houses died the Chevalier de 
Temay. The house was built by Deputy Governor 
Jonathan Nicholls and later was owned in turn by Col- 
onel Joseph Wanton, Jr., and William Hunter. Some 
vandal modem removed from the front door the pedi- 
ment with its pineapple adornment, but luckily it was 
transferred to a house across the street. It was a room 
in this house which was converted into a chapel when 
the French admiral died, and the body was surrounded 
with lighted candles and praying priests. 

The William Hunter who once owned this house 
married one of the Robinson girls and her descend- 
ants are yet among the smart set of Newport. The 
old Robinson house, in which the Vicomte de Noailles 
found shelter, stands just above the Nicholls place. 
Let Thomas Wentworth Higginson teU the story of the 
girls who once lived in it: 

" At the head of yonder private wharf, in the spacious and 
still cheerful abode, dwelt the beautiful Robinson sisterhood — 
the three Quaker belles of Revolutionary days, the memory of 
whose loves might lend romance to this neighborhood forever. 
One of these maidens was asked in marriage by a captain in the 



22 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

English army, and was banished by her family to the Narra- 
gansett shore under a flag of truce to avoid him; her lover was 
afterward killed by a cannon ball in his tent, and she died un- 
wedded. Another was sought by two aspirants who came in 
the same ship to woo her, one from Philadelphia, the other 
from New York. She refused both and they sailed away south- 
ward together, but the wind proving adverse they returned, 
and one lingered till he won her hand. Still another lover was 
forced into a vessel by his friends to tear him from the enchanted 
neighborhood; while sailing past the house he suddenly threw 
himself into the water — it must have been about where the 
end of the wharf now rests — that he might be rescued and 
carried, a passive Leander, into jond«r door. " 

Washington Street yet holds a score of houses in 
which are mahogany stairways and colonial mantels. 
At the comer of Walnut Street is the South wick house, 
which has been faithfully restored. Across from it is 
the old-fashioned place from which Captain Brownell 
went as sailing master with Perry to Lake Erie. In 
the Boss house, once the home of William Redwood, 
lived Captain Destouches when the French were here. 
A block away from the waterside a plain old gambrel- 
roofed structure bears a tablet, telling you that Mat- 
thew Calbraith Perry was born in it in 1794. Near at 
hand is Bridge Street, with its distinct flavor of the 
past. 

This was the court end of the town in its time, and it 
still has an air. " The sentinels of De Noailles once 
trod where now croquet balls form the heaviest ord- 
nance. Peaceful and untitled guests now throng in 



NEWPORT 23 

summer where St. Vincents and Northumberlands once 
rustled and glittered. And sometimes," concludes 
Major Higginson, " I can imagine I discern the French 
and English vessels just weighing anchor; I see De 
Lauzun and De Noailles embarking, and catch the 
last sheen upon their lace and the last glitter of their 
swords." 

When the French frigates convoying the transports 
with infantry and artillery for the aid of the United 
States arrived at Newport on July ii, 1780, the news 
spread so fast that by the fifteenth it had reached Phil- 
adelphia, and soon the whole continent was throbbing 
with joy. The Rhode Island town was quickly trans- 
formed. The householders returned, and there was 
much gayety. At the grand review in August, Newport 
was crowded, and among the visitors were nineteen 
Oneida Indians. Winter came on and the Americans, 
seasoned to New England cold, found some occasion 
for mirth in the muff in which Rochambeau coddled 
his arms. The yards were manned and salutes were 
fired when Washington's boat passed through the 
French fleet and there was a torchlight procession the 
night of his arrival. The following day was spent in 
consultation. All the senior officers of the fleet and 
army sat down with the commander-in-chief to dinner 
in the room whose windows still look out on Mary 
Street. That evening came the famous ball. 

No dance ever given in any great ballroom of a New- 
port palace can compete in fame with the simple enter- 



24 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

tainment in 178 1 in Mrs. Cowley's Assembly Rooms in 
Church Street, three doors from Thames Street. The 
Prince de BrogHe and other French officers arranged 
the decorations. Mirrors with branching lights were 
brought from private houses to hang upon the walls 
and about them flags were draped. In brocades and 
embroidered petticoats came the Newport belles. 
Washington, in his Continental uniform, led out Peggy 
Champlin to open the ball, and Rochambeau, wearing 
his Grand Cross, and his aides took the instruments 
from the musicians and played the popular air "A 
Successful Campaign." The figure then danced by the 
general and his pretty partner has been thus described : 
" Lead down two couples on the outside and up the 
middle, second couple do the same, turn contrary part- 
ners, cast off right hand and left." 

In the summer of 1781 the French left Rhode Island 
to aid in the operations against Yorktown. They had 
been domesticated among a people who appreciated 
their amiable manners and their resourcefulness in 
devising recreations. There are complimentary in- 
scriptions still to be seen where they were scratched by 
the diamonds of the French officers upon their window- 
panes. Many of these young gallants lost their lives 
in the French Revolution. De Lauzim fell upon the 
scaffold. Fersen was torn in pieces by a mob in Stock- 
holm. Rochambeau was imprisoned by Robespierre. 
The Count de Damas, with Fersen a companion of the 
king and queen in the flight from Paris, but narrowly 



NEWPORT 25 

escaped death. And Berthier lived adventurously 
and became one of the noted marshals of Napoleon. 

Many a sad heart did those officers of the allied' 
forces leave behind them when they vanished from 
Newport. There had been much idle trifling and some 
genuine romance. And, while Bret Harte's stanzas 
might convey a different impression, there was as much 
grief among the departing cavaliers as gloom in the 
hearts of the girls who had lightened their stay. 

" They say she died of a broken heart, 
(I tell the tale as 'twas told to me); 
But her spirit still lives, and her soul is part 
Of this sad old house by the sea. 

" Her lover was fickle and fine and French : 
It was nearly a hundred years ago 
When he sailed away from her arms — poor wench — 
With the Admiral Rochambeau. 

" And ever since then, when the clock strikes two, 
She walks unbidden from room to room, 
And the air is filled that she passes through 
With a subtle, sad perfume." 

The funeral pageant of the French admiral proceeded 
from the Hunter house on the Point, through Water 
Street and Thames Street and up the hill to " old 
Trinity " Church. In the churchyard a big granite 
slab, with an elaborate Latin inscription, marks the 
grave of Carolus Ludovicus d'Arsac de Temay. 



26 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

The vestibule of the church has a monument to his 
memory erected by the French government, and the 
curiosity of the unlearned visitor is satisfied by a trans- 
lation of the long inscription which some considerate 
person has hung upon the wall across from the tablet. 

Trinity is one of the chief " sights " of the city. 
-Approach it from below, as you have been recom- 
mended to approach the Old Mill. Church Street is 
almost an alley, with a sidewalk on one side only. Cam- 
brel roofs cluster about it. When the first service was 
held in Trinity in 1726, it was said to be " the most 
beautiful frame structure in America." The spire bears 
to-day its Queen Anne crown and royal pennon. It 
has long been a landmark for sailors, and the story is 
that Captain Kidd steered by it the course of his pirate 
ship. The church deservedly ranks as one of the best 
survivals of that style of architecture which was 
adopted by many New England builders who never 
heard the name of Sir Christopher Wren, but who came 
under the influence of the type of church building with 
which the great architect had filled London. 

No building in the State can tell more of the history 
of Rhode Island. The square pews, with their stiff 
backs, are still held in fee simple. The pulpit, reached 
by a narrow staircase, is overhung by a conical sound- 
ing-board, looking like a huge extinguisher, well cal- 
culated to make any wide-awake and properly consti- 
tuted boy wonder what would become of the preacher if 
it should fall. The desks for clerk, reader and preacher, 



NEWPORT 27 

each upon a different level, make this, perhaps, the 
only " three-decker " remaining in New England. 
There are verger-staves on the wardens' pews. The 
brass chandeliers have been in place one hundred and 
fifty years. The vaulted ceiling is carved with grapes 
and roses in high relief. The old organ in the gallery 
at the rear, facing the preacher, who is upon the same 
level once he has climbed to his desk, has a case of 
beautiful English oak. Above it appears still the crown 
of England with a mitre upon each side. A tablet 
under the gallery rail states that the organ was the 
gift of ** Dr. George Berkeley, late Lord Bishop of 
Cloyne, 1733." All these, and the tower clock pre- 
sented by Jahleel Brenton, are just as they were when 
the Right Reverend Samuel Seabury, first of Ameri- 
can bishops, preached his ordination sermon in the 
church. 

The interior is white and handsome. The window 
openings contain many beautiful examples of stained 
glass. Pause after service to examine them, and you 
will see that some bear such well-known names as Mary 
Rhinelander Stewart, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Au- 
gust Belmont. Over their family pew is a monument 
to Commodore Perry, placed there by his widow. Pew 
Number 81 tradition associates with Washington. 

The small churchyard is surrotmded by a well-kept 
hedge, under whose shadows are clustering graves, 
the oldest dating back to 1704. Most suggestive of aU 
these tombs is that of Nathaniel Kay, upon the edge 



28 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

of which is cut the name of the infant daughter of 
Bishop Berkeley, who was buried near. 

The visitor to Newport is bound to hear something 
of Berkeley, but seemingly there are few who can tell 
him much of the scholar to whom Pope once ascribed 
" every virtue under heaven." Everybody has heard 
a line of one of his poems, but the poem itself is so un- 
familiar that the first stanza and the last may be 
quoted. Berkeley was writing " On the Prospect of 
Planting Arts and Learning in America." 

" The Muse, disgusted at an age and clime 
Barren of every glorious theme, 
In distant lands now waits a better time, 
Producing subjects worthy fame. 

" Westward the course of Empire takes its way; 
The first four acts already past, 
A fifth shall close the drama with the day; 
Time's noblest offspring is the last." 

On a day in 1728, the Rev. Mr. Honeyman, mission- 
ary for the English Society for the Propagation of the 
Gospel, was going forward with his service in the then 
new church, when a messenger came panting up the 
hill and handed a letter to the verger, who amazed the 
congregation by marching up the center aisle and giving 
the message to the preacher. Mr. Honeyman read the 
letter to the congregation. A hurried benediction was 
pronounced, and all in the church marched to the 
wharf, where they received George Berkeley, Dean of 



NEWPORT 29 

Deny. Returning to the church, they held a service 
of thanksgiving for the voyage. 

The rupture of the relations between Dean Swift and 
the celebrated Vanessa had provided Berkeley with the 
funds necessary to carry out his " scheme for converting 
the Savage Americans to Christianity by a college to 
be erected in the Summer Islands, otherwise called the 
Isles of Bermuda." When Swift repudiated Vanessa, 
she revoked a will in his favor and gave half her estate 
to Berkeley. Bermuda became almost a craze in Lon- 
don. Berkeley talked over his plan with Queen Caro- 
line and counted Sir Robert Walpole one of his patrons. 
Having provided himself with a wife, he sailed for 
Bermuda by way of Newport, taking with him, among 
others, the artist Smybert. 

The dean remained in Rhode Island about three 
years. In a secluded valley he built the home which 
he called Whitehall, in remembrance of the royal 
palace in London. It is now kept as a memorial. The 
dean used to walk from his house to the sea, where 
tradition says he made a sort of study of a rocky ledge 
which still is called " Bishop Berkeley's Rock." Here 
he is said to have partly composed his Alciphron; or, the 
Minute Philosopher. At last came the news that he 
need expect no royal grant to subsidize his scheme 
and Berkeley prepared for departure. His house had 
been a meeting place for all the culture of the region. 
One child survived of the two who had been bom to 
him. His books and his farm he left to Yale College. 



30 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

Returning to Ireland, he found the bishopric of Cloyne 
and twenty years of work awaiting him. 

What a haven of refuge was Newport to all religious 
refugees in those days ! William Coddington and Anne 
Hutchinson fled from theological persecution in Massa- 
chusetts to become pioneers in Rhode Island. After 
them came the Quakers, and in time the Moravians, 
the Presbyterians, and the Baptists of various varie- 
ties, besides the Jews. The Friends early became in- 
fluential in the colony and supplied it with several 
governors, among them John and Gideon Wanton. 

Events in Newport are dated by the " occupation." 
The reference is to the British occupation, which be- 
gan in December, 1776, and lasted through October, 
1779. British depredations had silenced the factories 
and emptied the warehouses long before the armies 
came into the town. The fleet landed ten thousand 
men imder Sir George Clinton, and a portion of them 
stayed months and even years in the city. General 
Prescott succeeded to the command and his head- 
quarters at the comer of Pelham and Spring Streets 
may still be seen. A yoimg German barmaid who 
waited on the Hessian officers heard their plans and 
gave the information which resulted in the capture 
of Prescott by a daring raid. Later he was exchanged 
for Charles Lee. When the British evacuation came at 
last, havoc and desolation were left behind them. AU 
the churches except Trinity had been used as barracks. 
More than half a thousand houses had been destroyed. 



NEWPORT * 31 

At the time of the embarkation, Prescott ordered all 
shutters closed, " and the patrols enforced the order 
that not a man or a woman be allowed on the streets 
as they marched out." No wonder that the Revolu- 
tion destroyed the prosperity of a town that had been 
of greater commercial importance than New York, 
and that it was many a year after independence had 
been won ere Newport learned that her climate was her 
fortune. 

Other places still there are to see. The old City Hall 
at the head of Long Wharf, built in 1763, is an excel- 
lent example of simple and artistic colonial construc- 
tion. Just a ramble through Thames Street, with its 
odd mingling of the very new and the venerable, is a 
fillip to the fancy. The march of municipal progress has 
spared many nooks in the older parts of the city which 
the explorer will hail with grateful satisfaction. 

Last of all wander down to Long Wharf. Where in 
America is there such a succession of moorings and 
floats, tenements, drinking shops and boat-building 
places, as here between the old City Hall and the steam- 
boat landing and the railroad freight station at the 
end of the wharf, which upon the early maps was 
marked " Queen-Hithe," hithe meaning a small har- 
bor? Just across a little stretch of water is the island 
belonging to the government, called Goat Island, with 
the light at the end of the breakwater. Here comes a 
handsome power launch from Stamford and there in 
its wake is a flat-bottomed catboat. Lobster boats and 



32 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

splendid yachts, the plebeian and the patrician, rock 
upon the waves in amiable proximity to each other. 
Black-hulled torpedo boats are shooting about the bay. 
Three lighthouses in all are in sight, that of Ida Lewis 
among them. And amid the trees upon the shore you 
have glimpses of the piles of stone that make summer 
homes for the wealthy. This ancient wharf affords 
an outlook upon that blend of the old and the new, of 
the simple and the elaborate, of the romantic and the 
historic, with the glamor of fashion over them all, which 
makes one of the chief charms of Newport. 



PLYMOUTH 

" The pilgrim spirit has not fled : 
It walks in noon's broad light; 
And it watches the bed of the glorious dead, 

With the holy stars by night. 
It watches the bed of the brave who have fled, 

And shall guard this ice-bound shore, 
Till the waves of the bay, where the Mayflower lay, 
Shall foam and freeze no more." 

— John Pierpont. 

Standing on Burial Hill and looking eastvi^ard over 
Plymouth no great stress of the imagination is required 
to see the Mayflower come creeping into the harbor be- 
low. A shallop of but one hundred and eighty tons, a 
band of Pilgrims numbering, without the sailors, one less 
than a hundred, a voyage of sixty-seven days, and then 
Cape Cod; a compact, signed in a diminutive cabin, 
which made those adventurers the founders of a com- 
monwealth ; and, after foiu" weeks more, the landing on 
Plymouth Rock by the exploring party on that short- 
est day of the year almost three centuries ago, then 
the arrival of the Mayflower and the disembarking of 
the entire company — you can see it all, can you not? 
There are Bradford, thirty-one years old, Standish, 
thirty-four, Winslow, nine years younger, John Alden, 



34 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

the young cooper; and there are Rose Standish and 
the other young wives who are to be buried in that 
first hard winter, going the way that Dorothy Brad- 
ford had gone some time before. You see them climb 
what became the street now named for the city in Hol- 
land which had been for twelve years their refuge ; you 
see them staking out homesteads for the nineteen fami- 
lies in their company ; and you watch them laboriously 
felling trees and rearing their rude habitations. 

You see all these things, yet there are many details 
which the fancy must fill in without the assistance of 
history. You may picture Bradford as you will, for 
no one can tell you if he was a Lincoln or a Douglass 
for stature. No one knows if Rose Standish was a tall, 
stately lady or a dainty little woman, nor just what she 
wore when she stepped on the Plymouth shore. You 
see the redoubtable soldier of the Low Countries plant- 
ing his cannon on the roof of the timber fort and chm-ch 
built where you are standing, but no one can tell you 
if the captain's face was sword-scarred or not, and you 
may be sure that Longfellow employed his imagination, 
just as you are exercising your own to-day, when he 
wrote of the armament of the soldier who, strangely 
enough, was a member of that immortal company of 
pioneers. 

Never mind about the details that are lacking. 
History supplies facts enough to kindle the enthusi- 
asm of a nation and to make this old town a Mecca for 
sightseers from every quarter of the world. Here on 




a. 



CQ 



£-, 



PLYMOUTH 35 

this hill the wilderness heard the prayers and hymns 
of the men and women of 1620. On Cole's Hill, close 
to the famous Rock, they planted a field of grain, lest 
the Indians should count the graves of the fifty whom 
they lost that first winter. The Mayflower remained 
with them imtil April. Had hardship and death dis- 
heartened them? No! 

" Not sickness' baleful breath, 
Not Carver's early death, 

Their souls dismayed." 

Not one went back. They watched their little ship, 
not very reliable, but their one link with the home 
country, as she weighed anchor and started back across 
the ocean, but no one faltered. In the quaint phrase 
of the Japanese convert: " These men had a plow on 
hand; " they could not look back and be fit for the 
kingdom of God. " Ha! These men, I think, had a 
work! " said Carlyle. Their corn-planting and hut- 
building and wrestlings with cold and famine would 
not make one of the shining histories of the world were 
it not, as Palfrey said long ago, for the great conse- 
quences to which the colony of Plymouth ultimately 
led. 

Get the views left, front, and right. There on Cap- 
tain's Hill at Duxbiuy is the tail shaft to Myles Stan- 
dish, and you may almost see the valiant soldier stand- 
ing upon its top ; you hope that he is in the attitude of 
salutation to the figure of Faith on the national monu- 



36 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

ment here in Plymouth. There is Clarke's Island, 
where the Pilgrims rested over Sunday. From Gurnet 
Lights, eight miles away, you follow the Duxbury and 
Kingston shores to the steamship wharf below. Then 
your eyes travel on to " Poverty Pint " and Manomet 
Bluffs. Right below Town Brook empties into the 
sea — 

" The murmuring brook whose waters sweet 
Induced them there to fix their seat, 
Whose gushing banks the springs afford 
That eked along their scanty hoard." 

And just across is Watson's Hill, down which filed 
Massasoit and his twenty Indians to be met by Myles 
Standish and seven men and conducted to the governor. 
The Indian chief and the Pilgrim magistrate kiss each 
other — and there is peace for fifty years. Let the 
historians speculate as to what America would be, had 
there been war instead. 

Now come down into the town, reserving an exami- 
nation of the old cemetery for a later time. 

The Mayflower fades from your vision. The Boston 
steamer is coming in; its piercing whistle brings you 
back and sets you down in the midst of the hurry and 
babble of the Plymouth of the excursionists. Every 
day through the summer the swarming multitudes 
" do " the town. They come by train, by boat, by 
trolley, and by automobile. Their time is short ; they 
must get over the ground pretty fast, despite the fact 



PLYMOUTH 37 

that distances are easy. They read an epitaph or two 
on the hill; they look at a record or two in the court- 
house; and they crowd about among the relics in the 
Pilgrim museum. They tread upon each others' heels 
up and down the first street laid out in New England. 
Post-card sales are good. Clams and fish are devoured 
under the shadow almost of the canopy of stone which 
covers the Rock, upon which most visitors consider it 
their duty first of all to plant their feet. The laws 
against Sabbath Day traveling are no longer in force. 
The aboriginal simplicity and the primitive quiet are 
gone forever. The place has been discovered by the 
summer boarder, and its antiquities and history have 
been exploited by the excursion managers. The " per- 
manents " have their cottages everywhere along the 
shore and back in the woods, and the " transients " 
make the most of their few hours in the town. The 
citizens have accepted the inevitable with the best 
grace possible, and, like thrifty descendants of thrifty 
forebears, they have adopted the ways of the advanced 
civilization that has descended upon them, and turned 
to commercial advantage the services and souvenirs 
which these visitors require. Times have changed, 
indeed ! This is the town of the Pilgrims — and if 
you come to it by train there looms before you as you 
leave your coach a Roman CathoHc Church, The town 
of the Pilgrims — and if you remain here a Sunday you 
will find good-sized companies wending their way to 
the Congregational, the Unitarian, the Universalist, 



38 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

the Methodist, the Baptist and the Episcopal Churches, 
but you will also find that Sunday is the " big day " 
of the seven for the excursionists and that fines for 
non-attendance upon the Sabbath meeting are no 
longer levied. 

Now you are ready to set your own foot upon the 
famous Rock. If yours is a rush visit, you will be 
glad that the landing was made so near the center of 
the town. Come by boat and the canopy which screens 
the boulder will be right in your way as you go ashore. 
There it is, in the center of a square of green turf, the 
iron gates open, so that all may have access to the 
stone. From the hill just behind it — the Cole's Hill of 
the Pilgrims — you may look down upon the granite 
structure, which reminds you of a mausoleum, and 
beyond to the harbor and the sandspit and away to 
the great iron pole for the wireless station at Brant 
Rock. The Rock itself must be a pilgrim, for the shore 
here is all flat clay, but at Manomet the " stem and 
rock-bound coast " exists in very truth. A fragment 
broken from the boulder was once enclosed by an iron 
railing in front of Pilgrim Hall. But little of the stone 
is now exposed, merely the upper surfaces, and upon 
the side toward the town the figures " 1620 " have 
been boldly cut. The bones of the dead who were 
buried on this hill are enclosed in the canopy directly 
over the stone. 

Watch the throng coming up the wharf from the 
steamer. They form in line and clamber one after 



PLYMOUTH 39 

another upon that boulder, worn smooth by the feet 
of thousands of modem pilgrims. It does you good to 
see that very many of these gay excursionists bare 
their heads as they pass through one gate of the 
canopy, over the Rock, and out through the opposite 
gate. 

And is this in very truth the Rock upon which the 
Pilgrims landed? They tell you that you must give 
up Mary Chilton, fair and yoimg, stepping first upon 
the rugged granite; for the men of the Mayflower 
landed first, according to their own records. What 
evidence have you that the story of this Rock is not 
myth rather than fact? 

Well, when the wharf was about to be built in 1741 
(1742, say some writers). Elder Thomas Faimce, the 
son of one of the Pilgrims and ninety-one years old 
(ninety-six, say some authorities), came down from 
his home in the village of Eelriver to protest against 
the exposure of the Rock to injury, and told how his 
father told him the Pilgrims landed upon it. Mrs. 
White, who died in 1810 at ninety -five, and Deacon 
Spooner, who survived imtil he reached the age of 
eighty-three in 1818, transmitted this testimony, and 
the orator of Forefathers' Day in 181 7 told of the evi- 
dence thus saved to posterity. 

" An old, old man! 

His hair is white as snow, 
His feeble footsteps slow, 



40 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

And the light in his eyes grown dim. 

An old, old man! 
Yet they bow with reverence low, 
With respect they wait on him. 



" ' Mark it well! ' he cries, 

'Mark it well! 
This rock on which we stand: 
For here the honored feet 
Of our fathers' exiled band 

Pressed the land; 
And not the wide, wide world, 

Not either hemisphere, 
Has a spot in its domain 

To freedom half so dear.' " 

Thus the reverence which prompted you to remove 
your hat, and which made General Grant's wife kneel 
and kiss the stone, is vindicated. 

Follow the footsteps of the Pilgrims up the hill. 
Leyden Street runs parallel to the Town Brook from 
the waterside to the foot of Burial Hill. Here were 
built the houses of the nineteen families. The first 
or Common House was put up where now stands the 
gambrel-roofed structure bearing a tablet before which 
some chattering tourists are sure to be grouped. 

From their reading of the tablet they learn that the 
Commonwealth placed it to mark the site of the first 
bouse built by the Pilgrims, a house in which, on the 
twenty-seventh of February, 1621, new style, the 
right of popular suffrage was exercised, and Myles 



PLYMOUTH 41 

Standish was chosen captain by a majority vote, and 
that on or near this site on April i, 1621, the " memo- 
rable treaty with Massasoit ' ' was made. 

Across Main Street, at the head of Ley den Street, 
is Town Square, checkered by the shadows cast by 
the fine elm trees more than a century old. William 
Bradford's homestead was here, and here he began 
in 1630 the writings which, " peeced up at times of 
leisure afterward," to-day are "more precious than 
gold, yea, than much fine gold." 

The description of the settlement written in 1627 
by Isaac de Rasieres, who came to Plymouth in the 
interest of the Dutch at Manhattan, is interesting, and 
in some points it yet holds good : 

" New Plymouth lies on the slope of a hill stretching east 
toward the sea-coast, with a broad street about a cannon shot 
of 800 yards long, leading down the hill, with a street crossing 
in the middle, northwards to the rivulet and southwards to the 
land. 

" The houses are constructed of hewn planks, with gardens 
also inclosed behind and at the sides with hewn planks, so that 
their homes and court-yards are arranged in very good order, 
with a stockade against a sudden attack; and at the ends of 
the streets are three wooden gates. In the centre, on the cross 
street, stands the Governor's house, before which is a square 
enclosure, upon which four patereros (steen-stucken) are 
mounted, so as to flank along the streets. Upon the hill they 
have a large square house, with a flat roof made of thick sawn 
planks stayed with oak beams upon the top of which they have 



42 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

six cannons, which shoot balls of four and five pounds, and 
command the surrounding country. 

** The lower part they use for their church, where they preach 
on Sundays and the usual holidays. They assemble by beat of 
drum, each with his musket or firelock, in front of the captain's 
door; they have their cloaks on, and place themselves in order 
three abreast, and are led by a sergeant without beat of drum. 
Behind comes the Governor in a long robe; beside him on the 
right comes the preacher with his cloak on, and on the left 
the captain with his side-arms and cloak on, and with a small 
cane in his hand — and so they march in good order, and each 
sets his arms down near him. Thus they are constantly on their 
guard night and day." 



At one side of the square you will find the town 
house. The tablet states that the government house 
of the old colony stood there imtil 1749, when the 
present building was erected and used by the county 
jointly with the town until 1820, since when it has 
been used by the town alone. Across the square is 
the Church of the Pilgrimage, and at the head of the 
open space, facing toward the water and finding room 
for itself by the cutting away of a portion of the hill, 
is the stone church of the first parish, with a Paul 
Revere bell in its tower. Between these two cliurches, 
the older now Unitarian, the other Trinitarian, are the 
steps which give access to Burial Hill. The stone 
church bears two tablets, one with the Pilgrim ship 
in relief and the open Bible and a Greek lamp, the 
other reading thus: 



PLYMOUTH 43 

" The Church of Scrooby, Leyden and the Mayflower 

Gathered on this Hillside in 1620 

Has ever since preserved unbroken records 

And Maintained a Continuous Ministry 

Its First Covenant being still the Basis of its Fellowship. 

In Reverent Memory of its Pilgrim Founders 

This Fifth Meeting House was erected 

A. D. MDCCCXCVII." 

Where the two streets cross once stood the house of 
Elder Brewster, to which came John Alden, according 
to the poem, to do the courting, by proxy, for his 
friend Myles Standish. A picture of that scene hangs 
in Pilgrim Hall. The maid is spinning. The warrior's 
emissary stands in the doorway. Both are immaculate 
of costume. The house seems surprisingly well fur- 
nished. There are chairs upholstered in leather, and 
an oil painting on the wall of smoothly-planed boards, 
but a gun and a dagger along with the spinning wheel 
suggest the primitive conditions. Laughing faces suc- 
ceed one another all day long before this picture. 
Occasionally some one as he looks at it quotes Long- 
fellow: 

" But as he warmed and glowed, in his simple and eloquent 

language, 
Quite forgetful of self, and full of the praise of his rival, 
Archly the maiden smiled, and, with eyes over-running with 

laughter, 
Said, in a tremulous voice, ' Why don't you speak for yourself, 

John? ' " 



44 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

Almost every visitor to Plymouth brings with him 
a great stock of fables. If he makes inquiries, he will 
get down finally to the bed rock of fact, and he will 
find quite enough fact left for patriotic enthusiasm, 
too. If you are proud of your ancestor who " came 
over in the Mayflower'' be warned in time. There was 
once a descendant of nine Mayflower Pilgrims who met 
a Boston friend who had twenty-two and made no 
fuss about it because some one else had more. And the 
curator of Pilgrim Hall has inquiries from all parts of 
the United States from persons who think they are 
derived from Governor Carver, whereas, in spite of 
the Howland stone on Burial Hill, there is no evidence 
that a daughter of the governor married John Howland. 
Says the curator: " one of the hardest things I ever 
had to do was to break this news to a lady who had the 
Carver crest on her stationery and came here to get 
some more facts about her ancestor the Governor, 
telling her that he died childless." It was EHzabeth 
Tilley whom John Howland married. 

So the fancy of the poet, how, that Priscilla " should 
ride like a queen," John Alden on the wedding 
day 



" Brought out his snow-white bull, obeying the hand of its 

master, 
Led by a cord that was tied to an iron ring in its nostrils, 
Covered with crimson cloth, and a cushion placed for a sad- 
dle," — 



PLYMOUTH 45 

that also must go. For when Priscilla was married 
Plymouth had no domestic animal bigger than a goat. 

And if you woiild follow much farther the fortunes 
of John and Priscilla and Myles and the Barbara whom 
finally he married, you must go across to Duxbury, 
where atop his monument the captain still stands on 
guard. For, after ten years or so, the soldier paid 
Winslow for his share in the red cow that for a time 
they owned between them, and migrated. The Aldens 
went after them, and the Brewsters. The Winslows 
about the same time went to Marshfield. 

In Pilgrim Hall, where hangs the painting of the 
courtship by proxy, there is a collection of pictures 
and of relics that brings very near the story of the old- 
time Plymouth. There are large paintings of the em- 
barkation from Delftshaven and the landing on this 
barren shore, a considerable number of portraits, and 
pencil sketches illustrative of the English homes 
whence the Pilgrims migrated to Holland and finally 
across the ocean. Of books and documents there are 
the patent of 1621, the oldest state paper in the coun- 
try; a valuable copy of the journal written by Brad- 
ford and Winslow in 1 620-1 621 known as Mourt's Re- 
lation; a Bible dated 1620 that belonged to John 
Alden and looks as if he used it; and a copy of the 
Speculum Europae of 1605 by Sir Edwin Sandys, 
having the autograph of John Robinson. For the 
famous manuscript penned by Bradford, you must go 
to the Massachusetts Capitol. A remarkable story it 



46 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

has had. Having disappeared in the Revolution, it 
was found many years later in the Fulham Palace Li- 
brary. In 1897 it was returned by the courtesy of the 
Bishop of London through the efforts of Senator Hoar 
and Ambassador Bayard. The latter presented it to 
Governor Roger Wolcott in the Hall of Representa- 
tives, saying: ** In this precious volume — the gift 
of England to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts 
— is told the whole simple story of ' PUmoth Planta- 
tion.' " 

In Pilgrim Hall are chairs which belonged to Gov- 
ernor Carver and Elder Brewster, several ancient 
chests, some old English spinning-wheels, and a collec- 
tion of utensils and weapons, including the sword of 
Myles Standish. Here, too, is perhaps the most inter- 
esting cradle in America. The first white child bom 
in New England was Peregrine White, bom, indeed, a 
little while before the landing. The cradle in which he 
lay tradition has located before now in three different 
places at once. But the Dutch wicker cradle, well 
woven and moimted upon plain rockers, is probably 
the actual bed of that famous child. There is a large 
hole worn in its foot, suggestive of the qualities that 
made the Pilgrim impatient of bondage. 

Rather than disturb the graves on Burial Hill, the 
monument designed by Hammatt Billings was placed 
upon another site, a commanding elevation close at 
hand. With Masonic ceremonies the comer-stones of 
this national monument and of the canopy over the 



PLYMOUTH 47 

Rock were laid in 1859. Not until 1888 was the larger 
work completed. The enonnous granite figure of 
Faith, the gift of the Honorable Oliver Ames, is thirty- 
six feet in height, and stands upon a pedestal of forty- 
five feet. Projecting buttresses carry four smaller 
statues: Morality, erected by the Legislature of the 
State; Education, given by Roland Mather of Hart- 
ford; Freedom, erected by the national government; 
and Law. The pedestal bears marble tablets with 
reHefs of the departure from Delftshaven, the signing 
of the compact, the landing, and the treaty with Mas- 
sasoit. 

Plymouth has several old houses which you must 
know. Among them is that one south of the town 
from which Adoniram Judson, America's missionary 
pioneer, started for Burmah. His sister vowed to keep 
the threshold uncrossed until his return, and took 
away the doorstep. He sailed from Salem in 18 12 and 
did not return for thirty-three years. 

The Winslow house had a frame which came from 
England in 1754. Penelope Winslow is said to have 
planted the lindens before it. Down from Concord in a 
chaise came Ralph Waldo Emerson to be married in 
its drawing-room, and to Concord he drove back next 
day with his bride. 

In the gambrel-roofed house at the comer of North 
and Main Streets lived the sister of James Otis, with her 
husband, James Warren, the high sheriff. He became 
the president of the Provincial Congress, and she wrote 



48 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

anti -royalist satires which kindled almost as fierce a 
flame as did the orations of her brother. The lindens 
here are said to have come in a raisin box from Nova 
Scotia, and fine trees they are; and many a pretty 
scene, in which the leading parts were played by stately 
dames and gallant men, have they witnessed. 

But the hill where the story of the Pilgrims may be 
deciphered on the lichen-covered gravestones is bound 
to draw you back to it — cemetery though it be. You 
come nearer to the Mayflower company on Burial 
Hill than anywhere else, although a sight of such 
antiquities as the iron pot which was scoured by 
Lora, the daughter of Myles Standish, and some of 
the other relics in the museum, yields a very consider- 
able amount of satisfaction. 

You will seek in vain on Burial Hill however for any 
ancient memorial to mark the graves of the voyagers 
of 1620. Nor will you find more than one stone bear- 
ing the name of any who came in the Fortune in 1621, 
nor more than one again in remembrance of any who 
arrived in the Anne and the Little James in 1623. For 
these Pilgrims represented Protestantism in its orig- 
inal significance of protest against Rome. Supersti- 
tious practices were set aside, and among them such 
apparently innocent ceremonies as those which give 
visible expression to mourning and reverence for the 
dead. The only exceptions they made were when vol- 
leys of musketry were fired over the graves of Carver, 
Bradford, Standish, and two or three others. But even 



PLYMOUTH 49 

then there were no prayers. God's will must be done, 
and they would not intrude upon the inscrutable pur- 
poses of that will. Nor had they money for the im- 
portation of grave markers, and it may be that they 
lacked skill to fashion enduring memorials out of 
wilderness materials. 

The hour-glass and the scythe are the ruling sym- 
bols of this ancient cemetery. If the graves of the first 
generation are not to be found here, still there are some 
stones which go back to the seventeenth century, and 
seven generations may be traced in the records in- 
scribed upon these memorials. 

You will seek first of all the monument to Governor 
Bradford, erected in 1825, a marble obelisk about eight 
feet in height. The governor died in 1657 and the 
ancient record of his death reads: 

" The 9th of May, about 9 of the clock, 
A precious one God out of Plymouth took; 
Governor Bradford then expired his breath." 

The obelisk has Latin and Hebrew inscriptions and 
the record in English of the governor's life: bom in 
Austerfield, Yorkshire, England; the son of William 
and Alice Bradford; governor of the colony from 162 1 
to 1631, 1635, 1637, 1639 to 1643, 1645 to 1657. Ply- 
mouth enacted a remarkable law in 1632 which pro- 
vided that whoever, elected to the office of governor, 
should refuse to serve, should pay a fine of twenty 
pounds. Did the voters want Bradford more than 



50 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

Bradford wanted to have the office to which they 
chose him so many times? 

Right happy you will be to leam that, stem as were 
those men of 1620 and bleak as was the shore to which 
they migrated, they had their love stories, too. Gov- 
ernor Bradford's wife, Dorothy, was drowned acci- 
dentally before the Mayflower reached Plymouth. The 
tradition is that he wrote after a couple of years to Mrs. 
Alice South worth in England, a yoimg widow whom he 
had known as Miss Alice Carpenter, and whom he had 
desired to marry. It is conjectured that his own hesi- 
tation lost him his choice in the first instance. But, 
despite the changes which had come in their lives and 
the perils and hardships of the wilderness in which 
their home would have to be, the widow Alice took 
passage in the Anne, and was married to the governor 
soon after her arrival at Plymouth. 

The hill contains about eight acres and is said to 
have been used as a place for burial after 1676, when it 
ceased to be used as a fort. Very curious are many of 
the epitaphs. Here is one for a child who died when 
but twenty -five days old: 

" What did the Little hasty sojourn* 
find So forbidding & disgustful in 
our upper World to occation its 
precipitant exit." 

And here is the inscription for a man of sixty- 
seven: 



PLYMOUTH 51 

The spiders most attenuated thread 
Is cord is cable to mans tender tie." 

Several of the tablets employ the word " burst " 
in recording the virtues of those whose graves they 
mark, but in one instance, at least, the spelling is rather 
shocking to modem taste: 

" My flesh shall slumber in the ground 
Till the last trumpet joyfull sound 
Then bust the chains with sweet surprise 
And in my saviours image rise." 

Of the boy who died after twelve days of life it is 
said: 

" He glanced into our world to see 
A sample of our misery." 

And of the Elder Thomas Faunce, who pointed out 
the Rock of the landing and perhaps saved it from being 
forgotten, it is said: 

** Here lyes buried the body of Mr. Thomas Faunce, ruling 
elder of the First Church in Plymouth, deceased Feby 27, 
1745, in the ninety-ninth year of his age." 

A brief ramble about the hill will show that the old 
town played an honorable part in the history of the 
Colony and of the Commonwealth. There are buried 
here men who served in the expedition against Louis- 



52 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

burg in 1745, in the War for Independence, and in 
the War for the Union. You are reminded of the story 
of Deborah Sampson, the woman who served as a sol- 
dier in the Revolution, by the tomb of her cousin, 
Captain Simeon Sampson, with its willow-branch and 
its urn. In two graves on the hill were deposited the 
bodies of the seventy-two seamen of the privateer 
Gefieral Arnold, who perished in the harbor in the gale 
of December, 1778. The vessel dragged her anchors 
and the men were frozen before succor could reach 
them. When the pastor of the first parish, the Rev. 
Chandler Robbins, was called upon to perform the 
funeral service, he fainted under the ordeal. 

A stone which is sought by many visitors is that of 
" The Nameless Nobleman," Dr. Francis Le Baron, 
the surgeon of a French ship which was wrecked in 
Buzzard's Bay in 1694. With the officers and crew he 
was made a prisoner and sent to Boston. On the way 
a stop was made over night at Plymouth, and he was 
quartered near the Green in the house of William 
Barnes. A woman of the town had the day before 
suffered a compound fracture of a hmb. Dr. Le Baron 
heard of the case and that the surgeons were about to 
amputate. The prisoner was permitted to make an 
examination and his skill availed to save the limb. 
Proper consent having been given he was permitted 
to settle in Plymouth, and here he died leaving a 
wife and three sons. This is the reading of his head 
stone : 



PLYMOUTH 53 

" Here lyes y^ body 
Of Francis Labarran 

Phytician who 

Departed this life 

August ye 8 1704 

In y* 36 year 

Of his age." 



QUINCY 

" The town of Quincy, — the home of Wheelwright and 
Coddington; the birthplace of Hancock, the Adamses and the 
Quincys; a spot to be held in everlasting remembrance in the 
history of civil and religious Uberty." — John G. Palfrey. 

About twelve miles south of Boston, and a little 
more than a mile beyond Quincy Centre, stands a 
monimient upon which may be read this inscription: 

" From This Spot with Her Son, 

John Quincy Adams, 

Then a Boy of Seven, by Her Side, 

Abigail Adams Watched the Smoke of Burning 

Charlestown, 

While Listening to the Guns of Bunker Hill, 

Saturday, 17 June, 1775." 

The tourist who wishes to enjoy the beauty of Quincy 
and the patriot who would appreciate to the 'full the 
significance of the place in the history of the United 
States will do well to begin the ramble through the 
town at the hill where stands this memorial. 

To reach Penn's Hill you may walk leisurely out 
from the Centre, through Hancock and Franklin 
Streets, past the triangle made by the meeting of In- 
dependence and President's Avenues — the names of 



QUINCY 55 

the streets in this old New England town indicate the 
quality of the history for which it stands — and up 
past orchards and tangles of stones and underbrush to 
a summit of big boulders. 

Upon this summit stands the cairn, the monument 
erected by the Adams Chapter of the Daughters of the 
Revolution to mark the spot where the wife of a Presi- 
dent-to-be and the mother of another future President 
watched and prayed on the day of Bunker Hill. 

Abigail Adams herself has told the story. Her hus- 
band was in attendance upon the second Continental 
Congress. He had advised her if real danger threatened 
to fly to the woods with the children. When the seven- 
teenth of June came she said: " The day, perhaps the 
decisive day, is come, on which the fate of America 
depends." Qmncy was shocked early that morning 
by the thunder of the cannon of the British ships. Abi- 
gail thereupon took the little John Quincy by the hand 
and climbed the hill a half-mile from her home. 

Many years later the scene was described in these 
terms by Charles Francis Adams, the yoimger: " It 
was a clear Jime day and across the blue bay they saw 
against the horizon the dense black volume of smoke 
which rolled away from the burning houses of Charles- 
town. Over the crest of the distant hill himg the white 
clouds which told of the battle going on beneath the 
smoke. There was, withal, something quite dramatic 
in the scene ; but as the two sat there, silent and trem- 
bling, the child's hand clasped in that of the mother, 



56 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

thinking now of what was taking place before their 
eyes, and now of the husband and father so far away 
at the Congress, they little dreamed of the great future 
for him and for the boy, to be surely worked out in that 
conflict, the first pitched battle of which was then 
being fought out before them." 

Two sentences from the letter written by Abigail 
Adams to her husband next day complete the picture: 
" My bursting heart must find vent at my pen." She 
ended: " Almighty God, cover the heads of our coun- 
trymen and be a shield to our dear friends! " 

To-day one stands beside the cairn and gazes to the 
north, where he sees far as the eye can reach the multi- 
tudinous evidences of a great city. There gleams the 
golden dome of the State House, scarcely bigger than a 
thimble at this distance of eleven miles. Just to the 
right of it is a white shaft, almost lost in the blur of 
the horizon; it is the monument reared upon that 
Charlestown battlefield. 

Westward the view is shut off by the granite hills. 
There are derricks on their summits; the quarrying 
of the Quincy granite is still a great industry. South- 
ward the Blue Hills block the vision. They are beauti- 
ful, with the clouds casting fantastic shadows over them 
on a summer day, and lifting amid the foHage between is 
an occasional group of spires marking the place of a 
village or ** center." To the east the hill rises still 
higher, but from its brow you look into the depths of 
the pink granite quarry, worked formerly by one of 



QUINCY 57 

the Portsmouth Wendells, who " gave up the command 
of a quarterdeck for the development of a stone 
quarry." Eastward still you look into Fore River, 
which divides Weymouth from Quincy. There are 
the big ship yards where were built the North Dakota 
and the Rivadavia. The first vessel built in Quincy 
was launched as early as 1696. 

The shore of Quincy, stretching from this river 
to the Neponset, which divides it from Boston, 
curves and winds in and out, making Quincy the most 
indented of any town in the State. Up at its northern 
end is the peninsula of Squantum, where on the highest 
point has been bmlt a cairn to commemorate the land- 
ing of Myles Standish and a party from Plymouth on 
September 30, 1621. They were piloted by the faith- 
ful Indian Squanto. 

" The Sachem of the bay, by Squantum 's shore, 
Held o'er his feathered warriors sway of yore; 
There stood his wigwam in the hummock's shade, 
There the maize-tassels with the breezes played, 
There the red hunter chased the antlered game, — 
Thence Massachusetts took her honored name." 

Midway between Squantum and Hough's Neck is 
the Mount Wollaston farm, the residence of the 1-ate 
Mrs. John Quincy Adams. But this is the spot known, 
wherever the story of Plymouth is read, as Merry 
Moinit. It was here that the little May Day opera 
bouffe was performed. Thomas Morton set up his 



68 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

May-pole eighty feet high with a buck's antlers at the 
top, and around it danced that day in 1627 the band 
of white men and the Indian women whom Motley in 
his Merry Mount calls over and over again " the 
dark-eyed, dusky daughters of the forest." 

But Myles Standish marched over from Plymouth 
with his well-drilled army of eight men and scattered 
the " pagan revelers," and Endicott sailed across from 
Salem and hewed down the May-pole, and so the 
" idoll " was destroyed and " idolatry " was uprooted. 

This hill is connected also with the story of Quincy, 
because the old bent cedar which once stood upon 
Mount Wollaston suggested the design for the seal of 
the city. In 1882, when Quincy had just become a city 
after many decades of town-meeting government, 
Charles Francis Adams adopted the suggestion offered 
by an old sketch of the barren hill with its solitary 
cedar and the sea beyond; and the word " Manet " 
and the dates were added to make the present seal of 
the municipality. In a storm some years ago the tree 
was blown down, and a granite marker now indicates 
the spot where it grew. 

Now you are ready to leave the cairn and come down 
the hill to visit the old houses where were bom re- 
spectively John Adams and John Quincy Adams. Of 
the stones which were cemented together to make this 
memorial one was brought from the Concord battle- 
field, another from Dorchester Heights, and a third 
from the foot of the Washington Elm in Cambridge. 




O; 



O 



K 



QUINCY 59 

The comer-stone was laid with appropriate ceremonies 
on Bunker Hill day, 1896, by a modem Abigail Adams, 
daughter of a modem John Quincy Adams. The stone 
itself is a piece of poHshed granite which was made 
from a sleeper of " the oldest railway in the country," 
built in 1826 from the Quincy quarries to the Neponset 
River and intended for the conveying of stone to be 
used in rearing the white shaft just visible against the 
blue sky eleven miles away. 

A half-mile saunter down-hill and in toward the 
Centre brings you to the triangular area in which 
.stand the Adams houses. In the apex of the triangle 
is the Quincy Adams birthplace, and beyond it, and 
separated from it only by a narrow strip of lawn, is the 
older house in which the father of Quincy Adams was 
bom. The one house was built in 1681, the other in 
1 7 16. In the older John Adams was bom in 1735; in 
the later John Quincy Adams was bom in 1767. John 
married Abigail Smith of Weymouth in 1764. The 
house in which he installed his bride became the prop- 
erty of the Quincy Historical Society in 1896, and the 
house in which he was reared is now cared for by the 
Daughters of the Revolution. 

About 1770 John Adams removed from Quincy to 
Boston, but just before the war began he came back 
to his " little hut and forty acres." While her husband 
was absent during the war period, Abigail lived much of 
the time in the house at the foot of Penn's Hill, and 
from it she went to become the first mistress of the 



60 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

White House. When they returned to Quincy they 
went to Hve in the " Adams Mansion," just north of 
the Centre, making the third of the group of Adams 
houses in Quincy. 

The house in which John Adams was bom is "a 
plain square honest block of a house, widened by a 
lean-to and scarcely two stories high, of the type com- 
monly built by the farmers of the period." The old 
Plymouth highway ran in front of it, and around it 
were the acres of the farm with the orchard trees and 
an occasional elm and pine. The house has many 
marks of its antiquity. The doors swing askew. The 
uprights are out of plumb. The ceilings are very low. 
It is a composite really of three parts rather than two, 
as there is a little addition at the rear, built in 1840. 
The original structure had four rooms, two below and 
two above : when the lean-to was added it enlarged the 
building to eight rooms. 

Through a turnstile you enter the yard, which is 
enclosed by a primitive-looking rail fence. The rooms 
have been restored as closely as possible to the appear- 
ance of two hundred years ago. The kitchen, as so 
often in the old New England houses, is the most in- 
teresting of them all. There is a huge fireplace fully 
eight feet wide made of rough bricks, with a plain 
shelf for a mantel. The walls are wainscoted to a 
height of two feet, the floors throughout are of wide 
boards, the windows have twenty-four panes, and the 
big timbers hang from the ceilings. Of the few pieces 



QUINCY 61 

of furniture and utensils in the house which belonged 
to Abigail the one shown with greatest pride, per- 
haps, is the old cheese strainer. The musket is above 
the mantel, quite in the orthodox fashion. But, what 
is imique and striking, the walls are hung with fac- 
similes of such documents as the Declaration of In- 
dependence, documents which the boy who was bom 
up-stairs helped to make. 

In that room overhead, there is an old four-poster, 
its mattress held up by ropes, and a very old hair 
trunk. You choose the most substantial looking chair 
in the room in which to rest a few minutes while you 
study the furnishings, but you are quite likely to get 
up quickly when you learn that you have hit upon the 
only chair which was used by the Adamses themselves, 
a chair given to the caretakers by a granddaughter 
of John Adams, who died a few years ago at the age of 
ninety-six. In a case in this room is a portion of the 
riding cloak used by the second President as late as 
1 8 10, and a slipper, with very high heels, worn by his 
wife at the court of France. 

One of the rooms has a concealed niche, intended as 
a hiding-place in the time when peril was the daily 
portion of the patriot. The whole front of the fireplace, 
from floor to ceiling, mantel and all, swings out by 
hinges which have been attached by the rebuilders of 
the house. There, at the side of the brick chimney, is 
a recess in which one might be stowed away if he could 
pack his limbs in small compass. 



62 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

The house adjoining is similar in appearance to its 
older neighbor, just a trifle more modem perhaps. It is 
surrounded by a stone wall, covered, like a large part 
of the house, with vines. Within are many memorials 
of the time when it was occupied by John and Abigail 
and their boy Quincy. The best architectural feature 
of both houses are the doorways. These with their 
pediments are really handsome specimens of the se- 
verely simple ornamentation of the colonial build- 
ers. 

The mother of Abigail Adams was a Quincy, a daugh- 
ter of Colonel John Quincy, who lived on the farm at 
Mount Wollaston, and from whom the town of Quincy 
has its name. Thus it was that the lines of the Quincy s 
and the Adamses came together, and what a delight 
to the genealogist those family trees are, to be sure. 
But John Adams had some difficulty in winning Abi- 
gail Smith. The Puritans, with their literal interpre- 
tation of the words of Holy Writ, made the lawyer's 
an unholy calling, and Abigail's.' father was a minister. 
When his older daughter, Mary, married Richard 
Cranch, the father had preached the following Sunday 
from the text: " And Mary hath chosen that good part 
which shall not be taken away from her." But im- 
mediately after the marriage of John and Abigail he 
founded his sermon on the text: "For John came 
neither eating bread nor drinking wine; and ye say, 
he hath a devil." 

A good deal of the romantic and the humorous 



QUINCY 63 

blended in the early life of John Adams. Among his 
playmates was John Hancock — he of the bold signa- 
ture — also bom in Quincy. As a youth he writes in 
his diary, " Rose at sunrise, unpitched a load of hay, 
and translated two more leaves of Justinian." A goodly 
day's work and well divided, surely. He at times 
amused himself and " studied " Latin by reading Ovid's 
Art of Love to the doctor's wife as he lounged against 
the rail fence. Once he was on the point of proposing 
to Hannah Quincy. But an interruption came, and 
he resolved that henceforth there should be "no girl, 
no gun, no cards, no flutes, no violins, no dress, no 
tobacco, no laziness." Then, while he was nursing 
his resolutions against love, he met the " superb Abi- 
gail," and the next time he faced the ordeal of a pro- 
posal he brought it off with success. 

A stroll of a mile will bring you to the square at the 
Centre, the training field square which has been for 
more than two centuries and a half the focus of the life 
of the town. It is now a trolley center as well, and these 
cars are among the innovations of modem progress 
which have obUterated a great part of the antiquity 
of Quincy. For Quincy is essentially modem, and in- 
cidentally ancient. There are a few fine old mansions 
here, and many a site which carries one back to the time 
when the fathers fought for liberty. But as the in- 
coming tides of population compelled the change 
from the old town-meeting style of government, be- 
cause there was no hall or skating rink big enough to 



64 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

hold all the voters, so the increases of population swept 
away most of the landmarks of the historic past. 

But adjacent to the old training ground are three of 
the chief assets of Quincy, — the old stone church, the 
burial ground across the way, and the town hall, now 
called the City Hall. 

This town hall is built of the Quincy granite. It has 
fluted pilasters on the front facade, with Ionic capitals, 
but you wonder a bit at the Egyptian ornamentation 
which also appears there. In this building, whose ex- 
ternal appearance at least is unchanged, the town 
meetings were held for many decades of years. " So 
citizens and statesmen were made," says one of the 
historians of Quincy, " and the ladies were permitted 
to sit in the gallery and witness the process." 

Year after year in the old times John Quincy Adams 
used to be chosen moderator. He caused seats to be 
brought into the hall and hats to be removed, so that 
things after his time were done with more dignity and 
order. Up in what the ungodly called the " wisdom 
corner " sat E. W. Marsh and Charles F. Adams, the 
younger, J. Q. A. Field, and others who were said to 
be qualified to sit there, although they made no " in- 
decent exposure of intellect." It was in those town 
meetings also that Henry H. Faxon, " millionaire po- 
liceman," the temperance agitator and reformer, ap- 
peared to the best advantage. By actual count he is 
said to have spoken at a single session as many as forty 
times. But he was a generous and energetic man, and 



QUINCY 65 

it was through his efforts largely that Quincy became a 
" dry town." > 

You must visit the cemetery if you would get any 
grip upon the historic importance of the town. The 
names which bulk biggest in the story of Quincy are 
here chiseled most numerously upon the tombs. The 
dates range back from 1810, to 1792, 1761, 1704, 1688, 
and many of the dates and names have been obliter- 
ated by the wearing of the winds and the rains so that 
you might sigh for a modem " Old Mortality," who 
should chisel them anew, that the children of the pres- 
ent might walk abreast of the heroes of the past on this 
side of the Atlantic as well as in the land of Sir Walter. 
Several of the stones have fallen, and a few have 
broken in two, for the cemetery in some measure shows 
signs of neglect. 

There are epitaphs here which recall remarkable 
lives, lives that were linked with the work of the Puri- 
tan and the Pilgrim, the strife of the Tory and the 
Whig, and the ties that bound together the Old Eng- 
land and the New. Margery Hoar's mother, the grand- 
mother of " Dorothy Q.," " widow of Charles Hoar, 
sheriff of Gloucester, Ues here. She emigrated with 
five children. ' Great Mother ' is inscribed on the 
tomb erected to her by the Hon. George F. Hoar, a 
descendant of her son, John Hoar, who settled in Con- 
cord. Judge E. R. Hoar endowed a Radcliffe scholar- 
ship as a tribute to * the widow, Joanna Hoar,' by 
addressing a quaint, fanciful letter to Mrs. Agassiz, 



66 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

purporting to have been written by Joanna Hoar from 
old Braintree, declaring herself a ' contemporary of 
the pious and boimtif ul Lady Radclifle for whom your 
college is named.' " 

Here also rests the wife of the third president of 
Harvard, who was the daughter of that Lady Alice 
Lisle, whose story is told by Macaulay. Having un- 
wittingly given shelter to two fugitives from the battle 
of Sedgemoor, Jeffreys condemned her to be burnt 
alive, and when ladies of rank interceded for her and 
the clergy thimdered denunciations of his inhumanity^ 
he commuted the sentence to beheading. 

This is the tomb of the Richard Brackett who died 
in 1689, having arrived in the new land before 1630, and 
from whom are descended all in this country who bear 
the name. Here are two tombs covered with great 
flat slabs into which are let tablets of marble. One of 
them bears this inscription: 

" In memory of Henry Adams, who took his flight from the 
Dragon Persecution in England, and alighted with eight sons 
near Mount WoUaston. This stone and several others have 
been placed in this yard by a great-grandson from a veneration 
of the piety, humility, simplicity, prudence, patience, temper- 
ance, frugality, industry, and perseverance of his ancestors, in 
hopes of recommending an imitation of their virtues to pos- 
terity." 

Another tomb is that of three of the pastors of the 
old church opposite, one of the three being the father 



QUINCY 67 

of John Hancock. A moniiment in the middle of the 
little square burial ground is the Quincy tomb, distin- 
guished by the urn which surmounts it. The slab at 
the foot of the hillock on which the monument stands 
is marked " Edmund Quincy, 1698, aged 70 years." 
The monument itself bears the names of Josiah Quincy, 
Jr., 1 744-1 775, and Abigail Quincy. Just at hand is 
the monument erected by the Historical Society to 
Colonel John Quincy, 1689-1767. 

Most limerick-like of all the inscriptions in this old 
New England cemetery is one upon the small marker 
at the foot of a tree, designating the grave of a five- 
year-old boy. 

" Schoolmates, we parted on Saturday noon 
With hopes of meeting on Monday, 
But ah! what a change: 
Before 12 o'clock 
The arrow of death had entered my body." 

There is an Adams tomb in the cemetery, but the 
Presidents and their wives are buried beneath the 
church across the street. This long has been called 
" the Stone Temple." It was dedicated in 1828. Under 
the portico and built into the stone foundation two 
granite chambers were made. The walls are a yard 
in thickness and the doors are massive enough for 
some Old World castle. When the padlocks are opened 
and the doors are swung wide, the vaults with the 
tombs may be seen through an iron * grating. The 



68 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

chambers are lighted with electricity, and the walls 
are whitewashed and immaculate. In a case in the 
passage without is an old hearse with the casket in 
which the body of John Quincy Adams was brought 
from Washington. A tablet upon the wall informs 
visitors that the chambers hold the remains of Presi- 
dent John Adams and that " at his side sleeps until 
the trumpet shall sound Abigail, his beloved and only 
wife," and the remains of John Quincy Adams, and 
those of " his partner for fifty years, Louisa Cath- 
erine." To see these tombs there have come in one 
day, according to the register beside the padlocked 
doors, visitors from Richmond, Va., San Francisco, 
Cleveland, Boston, and several other places sepa- 
rated by distances equally great. 

The present stone church, replacing the old wooden 
structure in which the Presidents had worshiped, was 
made possible by a gift in the will of John Adams, 
whose death occurred on Independence Day, 1826.. 
The building is a severely plain rectangle of granite 
blocks, with an Ionic porch upon the front, and a pedi- 
ment after the manner of the old Greek temples. But 
these Quincy builders reared upon the roof a square 
clock tower and placed upon that a belfry. The four 
columns which support the portico are the first large 
monoliths which were quarried in the town. 

Within is a simple auditorium with a domed ceiling, 
a gallery around three sides, a high mahogany pulpit, 
an organ above the rear gallery, and no ornamentation 



QUINCY 69 

save a little beadwork and paneling and a waist-high 
wainscot topped with a mahogany rail running around 
the room. At the right of the pulpit is a tablet to John 
and Abigail Adams, with a bust of the President above 
it. The inscription was composed by John Quincy 
Adams. A tablet to the sixth President and his wife, 
also surmounted by a bust, is mounted upon the other 
side of the pulpit, with an inscription composed by 
Charies Francis Adams. Pleasingly sonorous is the 
language of these inscriptions, as witness these sen- 
tences from the John Adams tablet : 

*' He Pledged his Life, Fortune, and Sacred Honour 
To the INDEPENDENCE of his COUNTRY. 
On the Third of September, 1783, 
He aflSxed his Seal to the definitive Treaty with Great Britain 
Which acknowledged that Independence 
And consummated the Redemption of his Pledge. 
On the Fourth of July, 1826, 
He was summoned 
To the Independence of Immortality 
And to the JUDGMENT OF HIS GOD. 
This House will bear witness to his Piety; 
This Town, his Birth Place, to his Munificence; 
History to his Patriotism; 
Posterity to the Depth and Compass of his Mind." 

And of the marriage with Abigail Adams it is here 
recorded : 

During an Union of more than Half a Century 

They Survived in Harmony of Sentiment, Principle and 

Affection 



70 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

The Tempests of Civil Commotion; 

Meeting undaunted and surmounting 

The Terrors and Trials of that Revolution 

Which secured the Freedom of their Country; 

Improved the Condition of their Times; 

And brightened the Prospects of Futurity 

To the Race of Man upon Earth." 

There are tablets in the church also to the memoiy 
of Charles Francis Adams, " minister to Great Brit- 
ain during the Civil War and representative of the 
United States in the Geneva Tribunal " — two as. 
difficult and delicate tasks as have challenged the 
courage and tactfulness of Americans of any time, v^^ith 
perhaps one or two exceptions; to Colonel John 
Quincy; and to the Rev. John Wheelwright, minister 
at Mount Wollaston in 1636, and who was banished 
from the Colony of Massachusetts in 1637, a decree 
which was revoked in 1644. As you leave the church 
pew 54 will be pointed out to you as the seat occupied 
by the President and his son, the war minister to Eng- 
land, and a neighboring pew is designated as that in 
which the Quincys worshiped. You may recall the fa- 
miliar story of the boy John Adams, who stared long at 
the serried ranks of venerable heads in the pews of the 
older church, and testified in later years to the eflect 
they had upon his imagination. 

When Charles Francis Adams, the younger, made the 
address at the 250th anniversary of the founding of 
the church in Quincy he thus recalled some of the stir- 



QUINCY 71 

ring experiences discussed by those who worshiped in 
the earher building: 

" In the intervals of divine service, men and women have 
listened on the porch of this church to rumors of the victories 
of Lutheran and CathoUc in the time of Wallenstein and the 
Swede; they there discussed the issue of King and Commons 
in the days of the Long Parliament; they heard of the death 
of King Charles on the scafifold before Whitehall, and sent up 
prayers for the soul of the Protector when he was buried in 
Westminster Abbey. Marston Moor and Naseby were names 
as familiar and thrilling to them as Gettysburg and Appomattox 
were to us. King Philip's war hung a terror over them; and 
the story of the death of Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham was 
no less a cause of thankfulness here expressed in earnest prayer, 
than were the tidings that Washington stood within Yorktown, 
or that Grant was in possession of Vicksburg. This church 
had passed through nearly half its existence when its doors were 
closed by the first tempests of the Revolution, and its pastor 
read from the pulpit the freshly-promulgated Declaration of 
Independence." 

Leaving the Centre and walking northward, you 
pass through a street bordered with fine trees and lined 
with handsome houses, until you come to where, a 
half mile out, stands the Adams Academy, a stone 
building built in 1872. The site, chosen by John 
Adams, is the lot on which stood the house in which 
John Hancock was bom. It is a boys' school, taught 
for some time by a son of Edward Everett. Opposite 
is the large building of the Woodward Institute for 



72 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

girls, founded by Dr. Ebenezer Woodward, who willed 
a sum for the purpose. 

The home to which Abigail Adams came after her 
residence abroad and in the White House is a little 
farther out, having come into the possession of John 
Adams in 1785. It was built by Leonard Vassall, a 
violent Tory, like all who bore the name. He made his 
large fortune in sugar trading in the West Indies. 
When he reared this house in 1731 it was considered 
a marvel of architecture. The long, low, gambrel- 
roofed mansion, somewhat in the style of the English 
manor house, surroimded by an old-fashioned garden 
and shaded by stately elms, appeals strongly to the 
imagination to this day. The original house was of 
brick, and John Adams made an addition of wood at the 
eastern end. The most remarkable room in the house 
is the " panel room," so called from the paneling of 
St. Domingo mahogany which by accident was dis- 
covered in 1850 under the white paint by which the 
original owner had concealed its value from the pa- 
triots in war times. The study of the sixth President 
is another room of note, and in it the second President 
breathed his last with the name of Jefferson on his 
lips. 

The mansion is well called the " House of Golden 
Weddings," for in the " long room " John and Abigail 
Adams celebrated their golden anniversary in 18 14, 
John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Adams received 
the congratulations of their legion of friends in the 



QUINCY 73 

room in 1847, and Charles Francis and Abigail Brooks 
Adams kept their fiftieth anniversary in 1879 in that 
same room. 

Almost opposite the Adams mansion is the famous 
old house which bears the name of " Dorothy Q." It 
is with this house that the visitor may well end his 
pilgrimage, but to appreciate all that the house suggests 
he should inform himself as to the various Quincy 
mansions and the several " Dorothys " to each of 
whose names there was appended a " Q." 

There is the Quincy mansion at the " lower farm," 
that is at WoUaston, which was built in 1770. It rep- 
resents a line of Quincys whose descent has been traced, 
according to the wits, not only from sire to son, but 
from 'Siah to 'Siah. Another Quincy mansion was 
built by a Josiah, a son, of course, of a Josiah, two miles 
north of the "Centre." This building is now used by 
the Quincy Mansion School. Most interesting of the 
three is the " Dorothy Q." house. Edmimd Quincy 
arrived in Boston in 1633 with his wife Judith and two 
children. Two years later there was granted to him 
and William Coddington a large tract of land, on which 
Coddington at once built a farmhouse. Judith Quincy 
became a widow and married Moses Paine, and en- 
tered upon the full occupancy of the house. Her son, 
Edmund Quincy, married the famous Joanna Hoar, 
and his many children married and intermarried in a 
way that is a fond delight to the genealogist. Then, 
when Edmtmd Quincy the third built a new house in 



74 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

1705, he incorporated with it the Coddington farm- 
house, and the structure took the shape which it has 
to-day. 

It is interesting because it has associations of the 
first historic importance, because the Coddington por- 
tion has been called " the most ancient structure in 
New England," and because it has secret chambers 
and imdergroimd passages and other enchanting equip- 
ments. 

There were several Dorothys and each had her 
romance. Dorothy I. was bom in 1642. Dorothy II. 
appeared in 1678 in Dorchester, where her father was 
minister of the first church. She married Edmund 
Quincy, and, while she was bom Dorothy P., her mar- 
riage made her Dorothy Q. For her brother, Henry 
Flynt, the tutor, as he is called by all who love the 
story of the old mansion, she caused to be built the ell 
with a study below and a bedroom above. Then came 
the Dorothy Q. of whom Holmes wrote the poem which 
made her about as well known as President Adams 
himself. After her came the Dorothy who married 
John Hancock, " the signer with the signature which 
could be read without spectacles." She was the niece 
of Holmes's Dorothy and it so happened that she was 
bom in Boston. 

Now for the house itself. Pirst comes the kitchen, 
a large room with exposed beams and a big, wide fire- 
place with a settle beside it. You look at the heavy 
oak timbers and marvel that they ever were framed to- 



QUINCY 75 

gether in those early days. This is part of the Cod- 
dington kitchen, built in 1636, which means that the 
beams were hewn with an adze from wood taken off the 
estate, and that the lathing was split by hand. The 
room now greets you in its original color. When the 
restoration was made, under the direction of a com- 
petent architect, it took the labor of ten men three 
weeks to scrape off the layers of paint. Not much 
of the furniture is original, but all of it is illustrative 
of colonial conditions, and many of the pieces through- 
out the house have histories associated with them. 
They were given by members of the Colonial Dames 
for the furnishing of the house when they undertook 
to care for it, and under their direction the house is 
now shown to the pubUc. 

The dining-room is beautiful, all in white, with a 
fireplace, a buffet full of old china, an urn of satinwood 
for silver, and a mahogany table which came from the 
Middleton estate in South Carolina. 

In the drawing-room is the paper, covered with 
Cupids and Venuses, which was intended for the wed- 
ding of Dorothy and John Hancock. But the war 
came and the family scattered, and the nuptials were 
celebrated in Connecticut. This room has a double 
fireplace. The present white and beautiful front swings 
out and discloses the original, enormous and made 
of plain beams and plaster. When the renovators 
were at work this original was discovered, and the 
front was so fashioned that this primitive fireplace 



76 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

might be shown the visitor. Here were found also 
an old shell and some seaweed, sure tokens that 
there was at least one clambake here in olden 
days. 

In the smaller drawing-room beyond is a fine 
spinet, and, what is perhaps more interesting, a letter 
on the wall in a frame written by John Hancock to his 
Dorothy. He begins, " My dear Dolly," and tells her 
of his arrival in New York in May, 1775, " with the 
Continental Congress on hand." Farther along he 
remonstrates with her for the degree of favor she has 
shown a certain " Aaron Burr," and makes protesta- 
tions several and sundry of his own devotion. 

Adjacent is the study which was built for Tutor 
Flynt, with tesselated board floor, containing a clavi- 
chord and the chair of John Hancock, when he was 
inaugurated governor of the State. 

Up the steep and winding stair you climb to the 
tutor's bedroom, whence you pass to a larger room 
known as the guest chamber. Here is the four-poster 
carved with acanthus leaves, in which Lafayette slept. 
From this room you look out on the Httle brook in 
which, says the story, Agnes Surriage and her Harry 
eeled and caught the trout which they cooked in the 
kitchen below. 

Another of the up-stairs rooms has the initials " J. 
H." scratched upon the glass of one of the little window- 
panes. Thus Hancock, says tradition, left another 
autograph to posterity. There are several other hand- 



QUINCY 77 

some rooms and a tale pertains to each of them. One 
is said to be the Coddington chamber and another the 
birthplace of the Dorothy Q. whom Holmes made 
known to the world. 

Above the Coddington chamber is a space eighteen 
inches in height, lighted by the upper panes of the 
windows of the chamber itself, from which a shaft a 
foot square passes to the kitchen. This is the hidden 
chamber which the old stories associate with the Regi- 
cides. Food came up the secret passage on a rude 
dumb-waiter. There are tales connected with the 
family of Moses Black, who occupied the house when 
it passed out of the hands of the Quincys, which might 
help to account for these secret arrangements. There 
was a clause in a will, too, which angered a widow 
Black, and tradition says that she has haunted the 
mansion. The passage running imderground to Black's 
creek, of which many a tale has been told, has not 
been found. 

This romantic house stands amid beautiful grounds, 
and its excellent proportions make it a fine specimen 
of the homes of the colonial era. But most charming 
of all the stories connected with it is that which links 
the name of Oliver Wendell Holmes with the ances- 
tress whom he called " My Dorothy." She was bom in 
1709, just a century before the poet and wit made his 
advent. When the British occupied Boston, one of 
the officers amused himself practising swordsmanship 
upon a portrait of her. One of his liinges stabbed the 



78 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

pictured Dorothy very near the right eye. So Holmes 
began thus his poem upon the painting: 

" Grandmother's mother: her age, I guess, 
Thirteen summers, or something less; 
GirUsh bust, but womanly air; 
Smooth, square forehead with uproUed hair; 
Lips that lover has never kissed; 
Taper fingers and slender wrist; 
Hanging sleeves of stiff brocade; 
So they painted the Uttle maid. 

" On her hand a parrot green 
Sits unmoving and broods serene. 
Hold up the canvas full in view, — 
Look! There's a rent the light shines through, 
Dark with a century's fringe of dust, — 
That was a Red-Coat's rapier thrust! 
Such is the tale the lady old, 
Dorothy's daughter's daughter, told." 



LEXINGTON 

" Independence was scarcely dreampt of: all that the villagers 
were clear of was their right as Englishmen, and they stood upon 
that, with everything else around them in a dark far thicker 
than the morning gloom out of which the redcoats flashed at 
the other corner of the Green, . . . Major Pitcairn had dis- 
persed a riot and shed the first blood in a seven years' war. 
The dead men lay on the grass where their children had played 
a few hours before." — William Dean Howells. 

Lexington Common, basking in the sunshine under 
the deep blue sky of a day in June, with the blare of 
an automobile horn as its only tocsin and a legion of 
smiling sightseers as its only invaders, is so suave and 
peaceful, that, but for the tablets and monuments with 
their stirring inscriptions and the bronze figure of 
Captain Parker, rifle in hand, upon the stones, you 
would suppose it must always have been a place of 
undisturbed repose. But it was over that road that 
Paul Revere clattered, and from that house a few rods 
away John Hancock and Samuel Adams made their 
hurried escape. Just here stood the old belfry from 
which clanged the alarm that brought the Minutemen 
to the Common. The boulder across there marks the 
line of the Provincials, and beyond it is the house to 



80 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

whose door Jonathan Harrington dragged himself, 
sorely wounded, that he might die at his wife's feet. 

At Lexington the associations are almost all of war. 
From Arlington on, the road has been marked by 
tablet upon tablet, each telling some tale of that great 
April day in 1775. You are following the road of which 
Hawthorne wrote in Septimius Felton: 

" That night there was a cry of alarm passing all through the 
country towns and rural communities that lay around Boston, 
and dying away towards the coast and wilder forest borders. 
Horsemen galloped past the line of farm-houses, shouting alarm ! 
alarm! There were stories of marching troops coming like 
dreams through the midnight. Around the little rude meeting- 
houses there was here and there the beat of a drum, and the 
assemblage of farmers with their weapons. So all that night 
there was marching, there was mustering, there was trouble; 
and, on the road from Boston, a steady march of soldiers' feet 
onward, onward into the land whose last warlike disturbance 
had been when the red Indians trod it." 

Here a tablet indicates the site of the Black Horse 
Tavern, where Ome, Lee and Gerry, Marblehead's 
members of the Committee of Safety, were spending 
the night before the battle. Other tablets bear the 
names of colonists who were killed or captured by the 
British. On Main Street in East Lexington, not far 
from the church named for its pastor, Charles FoUen, 
the German scholar, is the house in which lived for 
many years the last survivor of the battle. This was 
the son of the Jonathan Harrington who died at the 



LEXINGTON 81 

threshold of the house facing the Green, a young Jona- 
than of but sixteen, who blew the fife for Captain Par- 
ker. He lived to reach the great age of ninety-six, 
seeing independence gained, the Union formed, and 
President succeed President until a few years more 
would have brought him to another April 19, and the 
sad spectacle of a divided nation. 

Upon entering the bounds of Lexington, on a slight 
hill just off the avenue, shaded by fine old trees, you see 
the Munroe Tavern. The tablet says that this simple, 
square, frame building was erected in 1695, ^^^ that 
Earl Percy used it as a hospital and headquarters at 
the time of the battle. In the room at the left of the 
entrance the wounds of the British were dressed, and 
on the right is the tap-room, where the soldiers obtained 
a liberal supply of liquor. In the ceiling is still to be 
seen a bullet-hole made by a ball from a British musket. 
The room has a wide fireplace and ancient cupboards, 
and the timbers, roughly hewn by hand, seem to run 
askew. Up the narrow staircase is the room in which 
Washington dined in November, 1789, with the fire- 
places, floor boards and timbers which antedate the 
Revolution. In those days the house had various ex- 
tensions and outbuildings which now are gone. 

For one hundred and sixty-three years this house 
was a well-patronized inn. The builder was a William 
Munro, son of a William Munro who was taken prisoner 
in one of Cromwell's battles and deported to Boston. 
He belonged to the clan of " the fighting Munros," who 



82 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

lived as early as the eleventh century on the River Ro- 
in the north of Ireland. They conquered a large terri- 
tory in Scotland, and to this day the Munro lands in 
Lexington are " Scotland." The first of the American 
line settled here in Lexington, married three times, had 
thirteen children, and as they married added succes- 
sively to his house an ell here and an ell there until it 
was said to look like a rope- walk. The son who bore 
his name built the tavern, but the fame of the inn began 
when in 1770 another William Munroe, great-grandson 
of the original settler, and spelling the name with one 
more letter, purchased it. 

This landlord was one of the fifteen Munroes who- 
had a share in the battle. He held the rank of orderly 
sergeant and lined up the seventy yeomen in the gray 
dawn on the Green. His wife and three little children 
found refuge on a hill behind the inn, leaving the house 
in charge of a " hired man " named John Raymond. 
The messenger sent back to Boston by the British- 
commander brought a relieving force under Earl Percy. 
They took possession of the building. The British 
advance went on to Concord, faced the farmers at the 
bridge, and retreated upon Lexington. They had been 
without food since midnight, and for many hours the^ 
Minutemen had been harassing them, picking them off 
by scores from behind the stone walls along the way.. 
Thankful indeed were the redcoats when Earl Percy's 
square enclosed them. A granite slab a little way 
toward the Green from the tavern shows where he 



LEXINGTON 83 

planted one of his cannon. The inscription makes no 
mention of one incident, but the knowledge of it by 
no means lessens the interest of the tourist, — how the 
widow Mulliken hid the family silver in a well near by. 
On toward the Green again, in the high-school yard, 
is a stone cannon, marking the location of another of 
Percy's field-pieces. 

Thus the Provincials were held back, while the 
woimded were cared for, and the exhausted soldiers 
lay upon the grass, worn out by hunger and the tm- 
seasonable heat of the day. The tavern was searched 
for linen for bandages, and it used to be said that the 
floor of the living-room was " inches deep in blood." 
When evening came Percy decided to resume the re- 
treat. Some of the soldiers made a bonfire in the tap- 
room, and on the doorstep they plunged a bayonet 
into the defenseless " hired man." 

Colonel William Munroe and his son. Lieutenant 
Jonas Munroe, who succeeded to the business in 1827, 
were jolly and successful landlords. The tavern was 
the last over-night stop on the long journey to Boston 
from Vermont and New Hampshire. Often there were 
a hundred horses stabled in its bams, and the yard was 
filled with sheep and cattle. The drovers were put to 
bed in long rows in a big hall in the second story of one 
of the ells which has now disappeared. The house was 
closed to the public in 1858. By the will of James Smith 
Munroe, who died in 1910, it came into the hands of 
the Lexington Historical Society. Furniture, docu- 



84 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

merits and relics have been gathered for exhibition, 
including a set of the day-books of the inn going bacL 
to the year 1773. 

Now you come to the triangular Common or Green 
with monuments and memorials clustering around it, 
In the familiar poem Paul Revere arrived here an houi 
after midnight on the morning of the battle : 

" It was one by the village clock, 
When he galloped into Lexington. 
He saw the gilded weathercock 
Swim in the moonlight as he passed, 
And the meeting-house windows, blank and bare, 
Gaze at him with a spectral glare, 
As if they already stood aghast 
At the bloody work they would look upon." 

That meeting-house is gone, but where It and the 
two meeting-houses which preceded it stood, is now a 
strikingly original and beautiful monument. This is 
a big block of red granite, desk-shaped, with a closed 
book of granite lying upon its slanting top. The monu- 
ment is supposed to occupy the spot where was the 
pulpit in the meeting-house which was burned in 1846. 
Panels upon the front and back are cut with the names 
of the first seven pastors of the parish, and the record 
of some of the principal events of a centiuy of town and 
church history. 

A boulder, estimated to weigh fifteen tons, hauled 
by ten horses from the woods two miles away, is 




Churcli and Monument. Lexington Common 



LEXINGTON 85 

another of the impressive monuments upon the Green. 
The front has been cut away and the remainder left 
in its rough and unpoHshed state. An old musket 
with a powder-horn hanging from its barrel is carved 
upon the smooth face of the stone, and points the di- 
rection of the line-up of the Minutemen. Below are 
inscribed the words attributed to Captain Parker: 

Stand your ground 

Don't fire unless fired upon 

But if they mean to have a war 

Let it begin here." 

A letter written by the Rev. Theodore Parker to 
George Bancroft, the historian, states that according 
to a tradition held in the Parker family this command 
was spoken by his grandfather. The orderly sergeant, 
William Munroe, who formed the line of battle, con- 
firmed the tradition, for when in 1822 a battle pageant 
was given on the Common, he took the part of Captain 
Parker, and repeated the words, adding: " Them is 
the very words Captain Parker spoke." What a com- 
motion there was then when, at a meeting of the Lex- 
ington Historical Society a few years ago, a speaker 
suggested that the evidence for the famous saying was 
not sufficient to amount to historical demonstration. 
But the war did " begin here " at any rate. Major 
Pitcaim heard the Continentals' drum beating and 
hurried his eight hundred men forward upon the 
double-quick. There stood the seventy yeomen. He 



86 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

ordered them to disperse. Not a man moved. The 
troops fired one volley, then another. There was a des- 
ultory reply. Then the Minutemen scattered. Seven 
of them lay dead and nine were wounded. And to 
continue to the end the outline story of the day's 
fighting: the British, on their retreat from Concord^ 
made a stand a mile or more beyond the Green upon 
a bluff; then they paused again upon Fiske's Hill 
closer in, and there Major Pitcaim was thrown from 
his horse, and the animal and the accoutrements of 
the rider were captured. The pistols are still to be 
seen in Lexington. Thence the troops fled to the shel- 
tering square made by Earl Percy's reenforcements. 

A tablet with an inscription and a relief of the old 
belfry designates the site of the little building in which 
was hung the bell which rang the alarm on the day of 
the battle, and which for many years after called the 
people to worship, warned them " at 9 o'clock to rake 
up their fires and go to bed," and tolled their funeral 
knells. 

Here also, facing that comer of the Green where ap- 
peared the column of grenadiers, is Henry Hudson 
Kitson's Minuteman, in bronze, leaping up a pile of 
stones, a figure admirably poised, and strikingly typi- 
fying the spirit of the men who fought that day from 
stone walls and points of vantage wherever they 
offered. 

Contrasting sharply with these modem memorials 
is the monument, erected by the State in 1799, on a 



LEXINGTON 87 

knoll in one of the angles of the triangiilar Green. It 
is said to be the oldest memorial of the war. A recent 
tablet tells you that the bodies of those who lost their 
lives here on the Common were buried first in the old 
cemetery, and after sixty years deposited before this 
monument. Edward Everett pronounced the oration 
when this second burial took place, and the surviving 
members of the company of Minutemen lowered the 
caskets into the grave. Lafayette was welcomed to 
Lexington in front of this monument in 1824, and 
fourteen of the Minutemen were presented to him. 
The long and rather oratorical inscription first placed 
upon the monimient was written by the Rev. Jonas 
Clarke. It records the names of those who fell, and 
proceeds thus: 

" Sacred to the Liberty and the Rights of Mankind! ! ! 
The Freedom and Independence of America, 
Sealed and Defended by the Blood of Her Sons. 



The Die was cast! ! ! 

The Blood of these Martyrs 

In the cause of God and their country 

Was the Cement of the Union of these States, then 

Colonies, and gave the spring to the Spirit, Firmness 

And Resolution of their Fellow Citizens. 

They rose as one Man to revenge their Brethren's 

Blood, and at the Point of the Sword to assert and 

Defend their native Rights. 

They nobly dar'd to be free! ! I 

The contest was long, bloody, and affecting. 



88 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

Righteous Heaven approved the solemn appeal, 
Victory crowned their arms ; and 
The Peace, Liberty, and Independence of the United 
States of America was their Glorious Reward." 

Clustering about the Green are several historic 
houses. One carries two tablets, reciting that it was a 
witness to the battle, built in 1729, the home of Marrett 
and Nathan Munroe, and the birthplace of Deliver- 
ance, the daughter of Marrett. A British bullet passed 
through a window in this house, and Caleb Harrington 
was shot when running toward it from the meeting- 
house, to which he had gone for powder. The vener- 
able building facing another side of the triangle has 
a tablet identifying it as the house to which the wounded 
Jonathan Harrington managed to crawl, only to die 
before its door. What is now the Merriam house was 
formerly the Buckman Tavern, a plain and well-pre- 
served old building, with dormer windows peeping 
through its sloping roof and a pretty garden about it. 

The handsome Unitarian meeting-house, successor 
of the churches whose history is a part of the history 
of the town and of the war, also looks out upon the 
Common, and near it is a lane which leads to the old 
burying ground. The tomb of Captain Parker is in 
this cemetery, also a monument to Governor Eustis, 
and a big slab supported upon six pillars above the 
vault in which the pastors whose names are con- 
nected with the Hancock-Clarke house, and several 
members of their families, are interred. 



LEXINGTON 89 

In the stone building of the Gary Public Library 
there are several portraits of much interest. Of these 
one which attracts the attention of all visitors is a 
painting of the young and handsome Earl Percy. Will- 
iam Dean Howells has told of the questions people 
used to ask him when he was a resident of the town and 
came to the library to read, and how one boy gazed 
long at the portrait and at last turned away with a sigh 
and the exclamation, " And he was a Britisher! " The 
picture was given by Earl Percy's grand-nephew, Al- 
gernon George, sixth Duke of Northumberland. Here 
also are a portrait of the orderly sergeant, William 
Munroe, and one of Major William Dawes, who, like 
Paul Revere, rode out from Boston to give the alarm on 
that April night, only no poet's song brought him fame. 
A fine painting of very different interest is an original 
by V. Brozik, of Columbus before Ferdinand and Isa- 
bella, presented to the library in 1906, and reminding 
many visitors of the famous picture by the same artist 
in the Metropolitan Museum in New York Gity. 

As you go across the Green and through Hancock 
Street to the Hancock-Glarke house, you pass the 
building which was occupied by the first normal school 
in America. This was long the meeting-house of the 
Hancock Ghurch, but was built in 1822 for Lexing- 
ton Academy. The State took it for normal school 
purposes in 1839 and in that year the school was opened 
with three pupils. 

Only a few rods from the Common is the building, 



90 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

associated with many important events and person- 
ages, known as the Hancock-Clarke house. The ex- 
terior is not impressive, and tablets in this village are 
so common that you might only idly note the occur- 
rence of another as you saunter by, were it not that 
visitors throng to this house. The record shows for 
one year the names of twenty thousand who came to it 
from all parts of the world. This is the manse in which 
lived the two ministers of the Lexington Church, whose 
combined pastorates counted up to no less than one 
hundred and one years. Only a part of the present 
building was in existence during thirty-six years of 
the pastorate of the Rev. John Hancock, which reached 
from 1698 to 1752; this part is the small, low-studded 
cottage, with a gambrel roof and gabled dormer win- 
dows. After an interregnum of three years, the Rev. 
Jonas Clarke came in 1755 and remained until his death 
half a century later. In this original cottage, the large 
room opened directly upon the lawn, and was parlor, 
dining-room and kitchen all in one. The room at the 
back, with narrow windows and inside shutters, was 
the pastor's study. From the large room there ascends 
a very quaint staircase. The two-story front part of 
the house contains the room in which John Hancock, 
" the signer," and Samuel Adams were sleeping when 
Paul Revere dashed up, and also the room which was 
occupied that night by Dorothy Quincy. The whole 
house is filled with interesting relics and memorials, 
including portraits of the Hancocks, a silhouette of 




'^ 



LEXINGTON 91 

Mr. Clarke, and a quantity of bric-a-brac, dresses, 
utensils, weapons and engravings. 

Pastor Hancock came to Lexington in 1698 on a 
salary of forty pounds a year and a special contribu- 
tion every three months, with a settlement of eighty 
pounds. His five children were reared in the four rooms 
of the little cottage. The oldest son, John, became 
minister in Braintree, and there the famous John Han- 
cock was bom in 1737. The second son, Thomas, 
became a merchant and built the Hancock mansion 
in Beacon Street, Boston. The other son was asso- 
ciated for several years with his father in the pastor- 
ate. The two daughters married ministers, and the 
daughter of one of them became the wife of the Rev. 
Jonas Clarke, who succeeded Hancock in the Lexing- 
ton pastorate. Thus this sturdy old minister had two 
sons who became ministers, two daughters who mar- 
ried ministers, and a granddaughter who was married 
to the minister who came after him in the parish which 
he had held for life. Let it be noted also that he him- 
self had married a woman who was the daughter, the 
granddaughter, and the great-granddaughter of min- 
isters. 

The Clarkes had thirteen children, and four of the 
daughters became ministers' wives. It has been com- 
puted that not less than twenty-five ministers have 
been connected directly or by marriage with this old 
manse. 

But after all, most visitors are interested more in 



92 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

the story of that other John Hancock who was sleeping 
here when the alarm was brought by the rider from 
Boston. Hancock and Adams were proscribed, and 
above all things the British desired their capture. The 
Tory ballad ran in these terms: 

" And for their king, that John Hancock, 
And Adams if they're taken, 
Their heads for signs shall hang up high 
Upon the lull called Beacon." 

But they were not " taken." A guard of eight men 
had been placed about this Hancock-Clarke house lest 
General Gage should attempt their arrest. According 
to the story Revere came clattering out from the 
Common, and the guard asked him to make less noise. 
" Noise! " was the reply. " You'll have noise enough 
before long. The regulars are coming." 

Hancock was for the Common and the clash of arms. 
Adams induced him to agree that theirs was another 
duty. They foimd a place of safety several miles away. 
In the manse that night were quartered also Madame 
Lydia Hancock, widow of Thomas the merchant, who 
left his nephew most of his wealth and the splendid 
Boston mansion, and Dorothy Quincy, who in Con- 
necticut the following August was married to that 
nephew, the future " signer " and governor of Mas- 
sachusetts. 



CONCORD 

Those of us who do not believe in communities believe in 
neighborhoods, and that the Kingdom of Heaven may consist 
of such." — Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

On the wall of his observatory at the Wayside, 
Hawthorne placed this line from Tennyson's Lotos 
Eaters : 

" There is no joy but calm." 

To the visitor who learns how the noveHst used that 
line, the quotation will be called to mind again and 
again as he goes about Concord. The town broods and 
dreams, remembers and waits. Serenely it cherishes 
its splendid past; patiently it bides its time, not con- 
cerned if no great epoch in the future shall match the 
glory of the era that has made it in America almost 
what Stratford is in England. It was fitting to choose 
from the Lotos Eaters a motto for a Concord study. 
For the river " slumbers along " still, as when Haw- 
thorne came to the Old Manse with his bride. The 
home of Emerson is almost as secluded as it was when 
the gentle seer daily left its door for his walk among the 
pines. As you look at the primitive little building by 
the Orchard House, the imagination makes pictures 



94 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

for you of the school of philosophy in that Hillside 
Chapel with the bust of Plato upon the wall. 

It seems a pity that any one living in Concord should 
ever be required to earn a dollar; he should give him- 
self altogether to the coining of ideas. The town, in 
spite of an occasional intrusion of showy modernity, 
still has the atmosphere and many of the features 
which won for it the affection of the group who brought 
it fame, and you feel that the fields and woods could 
be counted upon in time of need to produce a courage 
as bold and prompt as that which burned in the hearts 
of the Minutemen at the bridge. The town has that 
mysterious thing, recognized by all and defined by 
none, called " charm." It captivates. Concord should 
never be " improved." Sometimes you exclaim that 
the blare of an automobile ought not to be tolerated, 
nor the megaphoned eloquence of the guide in the 
" Seeing-Concord Wagon." 

A threefold interest belongs to this village. It has 
a placid beauty quite apart from its historical asso- 
ciations. In the story of its part in the Revolution 
and in the events which preceded the clash at the bridge, 
Concord wrote " the preface to the history of a nation." 
Sixty years after Emerson came to Concord. Other 
literary men followed. Thoreau had been bom in the 
village. Thus about Emerson there gathered a circle 
of friends and disciples, and the name of the town be- 
came associated with a school of thought and a group 
of writers. The homes and haunts of these men are 



CONCORD 95 

sought to-day by their admirers from every land on the 
globe. People like to look at the Manse in which 
Hawthorne spent his happiest years. They may even 
try to picture him in the kitchen, where his " magnifi- 
cent eyes were fixed anxiously upon potatoes cooking 
in an iron kettle." It pleases whole generations of 
Louisa Alcott's admirers to see the house in which 
Little Women was written, and to pick -out the chamber 
whose woodwork May Alcott covered with sketches 
of jolly faces and Greek gods. Many enjoy the walk 
to Walden and the circle of the pond, and if they add 
a stone to the cairn in memory of Thoreau their deed 
shall be counted unto them for righteousness. Nor will 
the home of the Concord grape be overlooked, and few 
there are who will not find pleasure in a quiet hour with 
the graves in Sleepy Hollow. 

Wherever else he may ride, the visitor must walk in 
Concord. Let him begin with the church and the 
tavern at the square, loiter out Monument Street to 
the battle-ground, and then make a leisurely round of 
the houses which witnessed the plain living and high 
thinking of the company of choice spirits who found 
here their retreat. Whatever your affinities, the little 
journey will yield a suitable reward. The scholar will 
rejoice in the significance of these homes in the history 
of American thinking. The poet and dreamer of 
dreams will find his fancy waking under the gentle 
influences that beguile even the most undevout of 
'tourists. And the plain, average person, who cannot 



96 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

write verse but has ears to hear, who cannot sketch 
but has eyes to see, and who cares more for the fellow- 
ship of the dinner at the club than for all the relics ever 
exhumed, will come under the spell if he lingers but a 
summer day in Concord. 

Here in the square are the Unitarian Church and 
the Wright Tavern, side by side. The simple and 
handsome church stands where once was the parish 
meeting-house, built in 1 712. A tablet imbedded in a 
big stone marker informs you that the Provincial Con- 
gress assembled in the earlier building. That first Con- 
gress met at Salem on October 7, 1774, and adjourned 
the same day to meet in Concord. When the delegates 
convened in the court-house on October 1 1 , the building 
proved too small and they removed to the meeting- 
house, and there stayed for five days. In the next 
March, the Second Provincial Congress assembled in 
Concord, and adjourned four days before the night foray 
of the British grenadiers. Once more Concord was the 
legislative capital of Massachusetts on the third day af- 
ter the battle, and the Congress left the town forever on 
May 31, 1775, when the members heard a sermon from 
President Langdon of Harvard. Another distinction 
soon came to Concord, however, for the recitations of 
the college in Cambridge were heard from October, 
I775> to June, 1776, in the meeting-house and court- 
house. 

The Wright Tavern dates from 1747, and is to-day 
as it was when Pitcaim there drank his toddy and swore 



CONCORD 97 

his oath. You may have a temperance toddy here 
yourself, if you choose, for the sign says that " soft 
drinks are sold over the famous Major Pitcaim bar." 
And near this diminutive counter you may take your 
chair and slowly quaff your mild beverage before the 
fireplace where " the good folks filled their foot-stoves 
with live coals to fortify themselves against the chills of 
a three-hour sermon in an unwarmed and all too well 
ventilated meeting-house." The inevitable old musket 
is on the wall, but then it has a better right to be here 
than in some other places where it is paraded. The 
collection of old utensils and china also is on display, 
quite in the orthodox fashion. As a matter of course 
you expect to hear that Washington was entertained 
in this dining-room on his farewell tour in 1789, and 
Lafayette on his triumphal progress in 1825. If re- 
marks like these seem somewhat irreverent, their flip- 
pancy finds ample excuse in the dining-room itself, for 
upon the wall hang these rhymes, framed in black and 
read with smiles by the most dignified of visitors and 
with good hearty laughs by the yoimg American: 

" One Brown once kept the 
Tavern Wright, and a brave man was he, 
For in the Boston tea-party 
He helped to pour the tea. 
This fact is chiseled on his 
Stone and grave-stones never lie, 
But always speak the living truth 
Just as do you and I. 



98 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

" The legend tells you that in this 
House the silver of the church 
Was hidden in a keg of soap 
Away from British search. 
Certain it is her ancient creed 
So guarded sacred things 
That to her solemn verities 
No soft soap ever chngs." 

With the Revolutionary history fresh in mind, you 
will wish to see the spot where was fired " the shot that 
rang." " The rude bridge that arched the flood " is 
gone. You are not quite sure that you like the cement- 
simulacrum which now spans the stream. You walk 
across it into an oval of gravel and grass shut in by 
an iron fence. The road of 1775 is closed, and the turf: 
is defended by warning signs. But the Minuteman 
is there in bronze, looking across the river at the red 
lines of the British column. He personifies for the 
ages the spirit that dared defy a British king, the grit 
of the " embattled farmers " that accepted the gage of 
war and slew the first of the grenadiers whom England 
sacrificed in her fight to whip the Colonies into sub- 
mission. This was the first statue of Daniel Chester 
French. The yeoman has seized his rifle and powder- 
horn and is leaving the plow in the furrow. The ped- 
estal bears the lines of Emerson: 

" By the rude bridge that arched the flood, 
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, 
Here once the embattled farmers stood, 
And fired the shot heard round the world." 



CONCORD 99 

Opposite, on the hither shore, is the simple obelisk 
of granite, for whose completion Emerson wrote the 
Concord Hymn. The inscription reads: 

" Here 
On the 19 of April 

1775 

Was Made 

The first forcible resistance 

to British aggression 

On tlie opposite bank 

Stood the American Militia. 

Here stood the Invading Army 

And on this spot 

The first of the enemy fell 

In the War of that Revolution 

Which Gave 

Independence 

To these United States. 

In Gratitude to God 

and 

In the love of Freedom 

this Monument 

was erected 

A. D. 1836." 

Most pathetically suggestive of all the monuments 
here is the tablet in the stone wall near this old obelisk, 
where are the graves of the unknown British soldiers 
who fell at this spot. They lie between two fine trees, 
their graves enclosed by iron chains stretching from 



100 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

the wall to a couple of stone comer posts. These lines 
are cut upon the slab: 

" They came three thousand miles, and died, 
To keep the Past upon its throne; 
Unheard, beyond the ocean tide, 

Their English mother made her moan." 

It is good to see that of the pilgrims who come here 
in scores every summer day, many feel deeply the sig- 
nificance of the place. Heads are bared before the 
monuments. Most pleasing is the sight of one visitor, 
who takes off his hat before the tablet for these name- 
less soldiers of King George. Some lines come to mind 
as you loiter here — the ballad of the " two fair-haired 
boys meeting by Yorkshire bridge," the " two soldiers 
near the London bridge," the ** two comrades marching 
across the Charlestown bridge and swinging up the 
coimtry road," and then: 

" There's peace and quiet by Concord bridge 

After the angry fight, — 
There's the stillness of death in the lonely spot, 
Though the far-away sound of a musket-shot 

Comes faint through the soft twilight. 

" Two English soldiers are sleeping there — 

And they dream of home and the early dawn 
When the far-away note of the hunting horn 
Came faint through the evening air." 



CONCORD 101 

Pitcaim and his men had been delayed but a short 
while in the raw dawn on Lexington Green, and had 
hurried on to Concord. But they knew the farmers 
were rising, for on every side bells were ringing. Pier- 
pont was not a great poet, but the facts are embedded 
in his verse: 

" Now Concord's bell, resounding many a mile, 
Is heard by Lincoln, Lincoln's by Carlisle, 
Carlisle's by Chelmsford, and from Chelmsford's swell 
Peals the loud clangor of th' alarum bell. 
Till it o'er Bedford, Acton, Westford spreads, 
Startling the morning dreamers from their beds." 

Emerson's grandfather, in his valuable memorandum 
of the events of that day, recorded how the Conti- 
nentals took a position back of the town upon an 
eminence, where they formed in two battalions, and 
awaited the arrival of the enemy. His narrative pro- 
ceeds : 

" Scarcely had we formed before we saw the British troops 
at the distance of a quarter of a mile, glittering in arms, advan- 
cing towards us with the greatest celerity. Some were for 
making a stand, notwithstanding the superiority of their num- 
ber; but others, more prudent, thought best to retreat, till 
our strength should be equal to the enemy's, by recruits from 
the neighboring towns who were continually coming in to our as- 
sistance. Accordingly we retreated over the bridge when the 
troops came into the town, set fire to several carriages for the 
artillery, destroyed 60 bbls. flour, rifled several houses, took 
possession of the Town House, destroyed 500 lb. of balls, set a 



102 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

guard of loo men at the North Bridge, and sent a party to the 
house of Col. Barrett, where they were in expectation of 
finding a quantity of warlike stores. But these were happily 
secured just before their arrival, by transportation into the 
woods and other by-places. 

" In the meantime the guard set by the enemy to secure the 
posts at the North Bridge were alarmed by the approach of our 
people, who had retreated as before mentioned, and were now 
advancing, with special orders not to fire upon the troops unless 
fired upon. These orders were so punctually observed that we 
received the fire of the enemy in three several and separate 
discharges of their pieces before it was returned by our com- 
manding officer; the firing then became general for several 
minutes; in which skirmish two were killed on each side, and 
several of the enemy wounded. . . . 

" The three companies of troops soon quitted their post at 
the bridge, and retreated in the greatest disorder and confusion 
to the main body, who were soon upon their march to meet 
them. For half an hour the enemy, by their marches and coun- 
termarches, discovered great fickleness and inconstancy of 
mind, — sometimes advancing, sometimes returning to their 
former posts; till at length they quitted the town and re- 
treated by the way they came." 

Thus the Revolution began. On that day, between, 
the time of their leaving and the time of their return to 
Boston, the British lost more soldiers, as Frank B, 
Sanborn has noted, than had fallen on the day when, 
upon the Heights of Abraham, Wolfe conquered Can- 
ada. 

On each side of the road to the bridge is a splendid 
avenue of pines. Between the boughs of green, above- 







The Old Maiisc, Concord 



CONCORD 103 

the footpaths in which you walk, the sunHght streams 
in a wavering band of gold. The walks are bordered 
with benches, and on these, like true Americans, the 
picknickers have carved their names and residences, 
and in some instances yet other details of family his- 
tory. 

And this is Musketaquid, as Emerson loved to call 
the river, a stream which Hawthorne found to be 
" about the breadth of twenty strokes of a swimmer's 
arm." The novelist has interpreted the stream in 
prose and the seer in verse. Said Hawthorne: "It 
may well be called the Concord, — the river of peace 
and quietness; for it is certainly the most unexcitable 
and sluggish stream that ever loitered imperceptibly 
towards its eternity, — the sea. Positively I had lived 
three weeks beside it before it grew quite clear to my 
perception which way the current flowed." 

To which Alcott added: " It runs slowly because it 
hates to leave Concord." 

All this time, across from the bronze Minuteman, 
between the river and the street, the Old Manse has 
been holding you in half slumbering regard. Truly 
the house has a look of mystery and sleepiness. Fine 
trees swing their branches over it protectingly. It 
seems to face the highway with a reproachful air. For 
it has an imkempt look nowadays; new paint would 
make it too obtrusive, perhaps, but some little repairs 
would show at least that man holds it in loving regard, 
as well as do the trees, about which chatter the squirrels 



104 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

who are the sole tenants of the property whence 
Emerson's grandfather witnessed the battle at the 
bridge, where Emerson himself wrote Nature, and in 
which Hawthorne and his bride set up housekeeping. 
Of this home the philosopher said: 

" My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and 
on the skirt of the village. But I go with my friend to the 
shore of our little river; and with one stroke of the paddle, I 
leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world 
of villages and personalities, behind, and pass into a deUcate 
realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted 
man to enter without novitiate and probation." 

In the Mosses from an Old Manse there occur these 
characteristic passages from Hawthorne, which still 
hold good for the general aspect of the house: 

" Between two tall gate-posts of rough-hewn stone (the 
gate itself having fallen from its hinges at some unknown epoch) 
we beheld the gray front of the old parsonage, terminating the 
vista of an avenue of black-ash trees. . . . There was in the rear 
of the house the most delightful little nook of a study that ever 
afforded its snug seclusion to a scholar. It was here that Emer- 
son wrote Nature; for he was then an inhabitant of the Manse, 
and used to watch the Assyrian dawn and the Paphian sunset 
and moonrise from the summit of our eastern hill. . , . The 
study had three windows, set with little old-fashioned panes of 
glass, each with a crack across it. The two on the western side 
looked, or rather peeped, between the willow branches, down into 
the orchard, with glimpses of the river through the trees. The 
third, facing northward, commanded a broader view of the 



CONCORD 105 

river, at a spot where its hitherto obscure waters gleam forth 
into the light of history. . . ." 



The Manse was built ten years before the battle at 
the bridge for the Rev. William Emerson. His wife, 
who had been Phoebe Bliss, was early left a widow. 
A man nine years her junior, the Rev. Ezra Ripley, 
tmdismayed by her young " encumbrances," married 
her and succeeded to the pastorate. Dr. Ripley was a 
character. Witness the story of his chaise, how he 
entered in his diary the prayer: " The Lord grant it 
may be a comfort and a blessing to my family," and 
how, when they were thrown out of it, he wrote: " I 
desire that the Lord wd teach me suitably to repent 
this Providence, make suitable remarks upon it, and 
to be suitably affected by it." 

A " little whitewashed apartment " in the Manse, 
Hawthorne said, " bore the traditionary title of the 
Saint's Chamber, because holy men in their youth had 
slept, and studied and prayed there." The novelist, 
indeed, found it " awful to reflect how many sermons 
must have been written " in the house. In his American 
Note Books there are foimd entertaining remarks upon 
the furnishing and furbishing of the old parsonage by 
his bride and himself, and in the first of the Mosses he 
refers to the strange vicissitude which led him from 
the Manse to a custom-house. 

Sleepy Hollow may come next in the itinerary. Be- 
yond the hollow from which the cemetery derives its 



106 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

name, upon a ridge crowned with fine trees, are the 
graves of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau and the 
Alcotts. Emerson 's resting place is marked by a splen- 
did boulder of rose quartz. His wife lies by his side, 
and the boy in whose memory he wrote the Threnody. 
Here it was that a company of distinguished men and 
women gathered in 1882 to strew twigs of pine over 
the casket of the seer. Longfellow's Resignation was 
read at the funeral, as it had been five weeks before, 
at the funeral of its author. Louisa Alcott's harp of 
yellow jonquils was placed before the pulpit, and her 
father read a sonnet of his own, beginning " His harp 
is silent." In his address Judge Hoar referred to 
Emerson's descent from the founders of the town. The 
Rev. Peter Bulkeley, a Puritan minister, came from 
England in 1634, and the following year the colony of 
Concord was granted to him and a few others by Win- 
throp and his legislature. This minister's granddaugh- 
ter married the Rev. Joseph Emerson, their son mar- 
ried Rebecca Waldo, whose son in turn became a clergy- 
man and married Phoebe BHss, for whom the Old 
Manse was built. 

The grave of Hawthorne is secluded by a hedge, 
as if the author even in death craved the modest retire- 
ment which he cultivated in life. He died in New 
Hampshire in 1864. When his casket came into the 
Concord church, the interior was filled with apple 
blossoms, and the widow said it looked to her like a 
heavenly festival. Through the service there sat side by 



CONCORD 107 

side Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow, Agassiz, Holmes, 
Whipple, James T. Fields and Franklin Pierce, who 
had been Hawthorne's classmate, friend and political 
benefactor. The entire company, except Mrs. Haw- 
thorne, walked from the church to Sleepy Hollow, and 
into the grave all cast sprays of arbor vitae save Agas- 
siz, who dropped a bunch of violets upon the casket. 
Longfellow's stanza describes the time and scene: 

" The lovely town was white with apple-blooms, 
And the great elms o'erhead 
Dark shadows wove on their aerial looms 
Shot through with golden thread." 

The gravestone bears but the one word " Hawthorne." 
That was his wish. He had found Wordsworth's Eng- 
lish grave satisfying, and had written: " It is pleasant 
to think and know that he did not care for a stately 
monument." 

On this " hill-top hearsed with pines " are the group 
of markers for the Thoreaus and the simple granite 
monument with the names John and Cynthia, John 
Jimior and Helen, Henry D., who died in 1862, and 
Sophia, who died in 1876. 

Five low stones designate the graves of the Alcotts, 
and a plain monument gives the names and dates: 
the father, Amos Bronson, who died in 1888, the mother, 
Abigail May, and the daughters, Elizabeth, May, and 
Louisa May, who also died in 1888. The other daugh- 
ter, Anna, is also named, but she is said to have been 



108 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

buried in another lot beside her husband. The small 
markers bear initials only, except that the pubUc de- 
manded for its convenience that the name of the writer 
of Little Women be cut in full upon her stone. This 
grave is sought by fully as many pilgrims as 'come to 
see those of the seer and the novelist, and it is good 
to hear of the small boy who gave the stone a shy little 
hug before he turned away from it. 

Near the foot of the ridge are certain graves which 
must not be overiooked, if only for the exquisite epi- 
taphs placed upon the monuments of his father and 
brother by Judge E. R. Hoar. Samuel Hoar's tomb 
has upon it the design of a window, with the words 
from Pilgrim's Progress: 

" The Pilgrim 

They laid in a chamber whose window 

Opened toward the sunrising. 

The name of the chamber was 

PEACE. 

There he lay till break of day, and then 

He awoke and sang." 

The eminent men who bore this name, Judge Hoar 
and Senator Hoar, were bom in Concord. Their sis- 
ter would have married Charles Emerson, but for his 
early death. She became a close friend of Ralph Waldo 
Emerson, and he called her " Elizabeth, the wise." 

Coming back to the square, you will note that the 
retaining wall which prevents the hill from spilling into 



CONCORD 109 

the street bears a tablet stating that the settlers built 
on its southern slope their dwellings during the first 
winter, and that on the summit stood the liberty pole 
of the Revolution. There are historic graves on the 
top of the hill, among them that of Major John But- 
trick, who fought at the North Bridge, and that of 
Emerson's grandfather, who died in Vermont, where he 
had gone as a chaplain in the army of General Gates. 
But the most interesting epitaph is that ciirious anti- 
thetical composition which appears on the stone of 
John Jack, a slave who died in the town in 1773: 

" God wills us free, man wills us slaves. 
I will as God wills; God's will be done. 
Here lies the body of 
JOHN JACK 
A native of Africa, who died 
March 1773 aged about 60 years. 
Tho' born in a land of slavery, 
He was born free. 
Tho' he Uved in a land of liberty 
He lived a slave; 
Till by his honest though stolen labors, 
He acquired the source of slavery, 
Which gave him his freedom: 
Tho' not long before 
Death the grand tyrant 
Gave him his final emancipation 
And put him on a footing with kings. 
Tho' a slave to vice 
He practiced those virtues 
Without which kings are but slaves." 



no HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

To appreciate the Concord Library, it is desirable 
to know a little of the man who drew up a curious con- 
stitution for it in 1 784, providing that the books should 
not be kept more than half a mile from the meeting- 
house and that they might be drawn on the first 
Wednesday of each month. Good Dr. Ezra Ripley was 
" so conscientious that he returned thanks publicly 
for his first pair of spectacles," and " so zealous that 
he would start out to attend Sunday service though 
the snow was higher than his horse's head." Then 
away back in 1672, among the instructions given the 
town selectmen, was this article: 

" That care be taken of the Books of Marters and other 
bookes that belong to the Towne, that they be kept from abusive 
usage, and not lent to persons more than one month at one time." 

In the library of to-day is an interesting collection 
of busts and portraits, and the alcove of books written 
by residents of the town is remarkably large; and, 
what is better than quantity, most of them stand for the 
highest levels of quality. There is a large collection 
of relics and old furniture in the house of the Antiqua- 
rian Society. 

The house in which Emerson lived from 1835 imtil 
his death is on a road angling off to the right of the 
Lexington road and but a short distance from the 
Green. It is a square, white structure, built on lines 
that are simple and sincere, and partly screened by 
lofty pines and chestnuts planted by Thoreau and 




Ralph Waldo Emerson House, Concord 



CONCORD 111 

Alcott at a time when Emerson was visiting Europe. 
Under date of July 27, 1835, the seer said in one of his 
letters: 

" Has Charles told you that I have dodged the doom of 
building, and have bought the Coolidge house in Concord, 
with the expectation of entering it next September? It is a 
mean place, and cannot be fine until trees and flowers give it a 
character of its own. But we shall crowd so many books and 
papers, and if possible, wise friends into it that it shall have 
as much wit as it can carry. My house cost me $3500, and 
may next summer cost me four or five more to enlarge and 
finish. The seller alleges that it cost him $7800." 

Little has the house changed in the thirty years 
since Emerson left it. Long it was occupied by his 
daughter, Miss Ellen Emerson, whom the whole village 
held in reverence. An old-fashioned fence encloses 
the premises. You may not enter. The visitor who 
expects to sit in Emerson's chair and look out from his 
comer upon his favorite view must go away disap- 
pointed, though the study is kept as Emerson left it. 
Among the men who thronged to him in his seclusion 
was George William Curtis, who left a detailed picture 
of the appearance of that literary workshop. 

" Mr. Emerson's library," he said, " is the room at the right 
of the door upon entering the house. It is a simple square room, 
not walled with books Uke the den of a hterary grub, nor 
merely elegant like the ornamental retreat of a dilettante. The 
books are arranged upon plain shelves, not in architectural book- 
cases, and the room is hung with a few choice engravings of the 



112 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

greatest men. There was a fair copy of Michael Angelo's 
* Fates,' which, properly enough, imparted that grave serenity 
to the ornament of the room which is always apparent in what 
is written there. It is the study of a scholar. All our author's 
pubhshed writings, the essays, orations and poems, date from 
this room, as much as they date from any place or moment. 
" The library is not only the study of a scholar, it is the bower 
of a poet. The pines lean against the windows, and, to the stu- 
dent deeply sunk in learned lore, or soaring upon the daring spec- 
ulations of an intrepid philosophy, they whisper a secret beyond 
that of the philosopher's stone, and sing of the springs of poetry. 
It is not hazardous to say that the greatest questions of our day 
and of all days have been nowhere more amply discussed, with 
more prophetic insight or profound conviction, than in the 
comely square white house upon the edge of the Lexington 
turnpike." 

Out the Lexington road again, and but a short way, 
at a point where the steep hill has curved inward and 
made room for the building, stands the Orchard House, 
the home of the Alcott family for twenty years. When 
Bronson Alcott moved there it was a forlorn enough 
place, made attractive only by the hill and the woods 
at the back and the fine prospect from the front. He 
enlarged it, and made it handsome, and shut it off from 
the highway by a rustic fence of his own construction. 
An apple orchard adjacent gave it the name by which 
it is best known. Of this house Hawthorne said in 
Septimius Felton : 

" A house of somewhat more pretension, a hundred yards 
or so nearer to the village, standing back from the road in the 



CONCORD 113 

broader space which the retreating hill, cloven by a gap in that 
place, afforded; where some elms intervened between it and the 
road,' offering a site which some person of a natural taste for 
the gently picturesque had seized upon. These same elms, or 
their successors, still flung a noble shade over the same old 
house, which the magic hand of Alcott has improved by the 
touch that throws grace, amiableness and natural beauty over 
scenes that have Uttle pretension in themselves." 

And in his Tablets Alcott himself wrote: 

" My neighbors flatter me in telUng me that I have one of the 
best placed and most picturesque houses in town; as for fences 
and gates, I was told that mine were unlike any other m the 
world." 

The house fell upon evil days when the Alcotts left 
it. The roof sagged, the sides warped, the windows 
lost their glass, crevices opened in the chimneys, the 
lawn grew huge crops of weeds. But now a new era 
has come. The Concord Woman's Club has acquired 
the house, through gifts ranging from a dime to five 
hundred dollars, which have come from grandmothers, 
mothers and children in ever>^ comer of the country, 
and the author of An Old-Fashioned Girl and the other 
famous juveniles is to have her memorial. Weeks of 
labor were needful to restore a house which had been 
standing two hundred years. Four rooms appear very 
nearly as they were when the Alcott family Uved m 
them. The study has the book-shelves which the sage 
made himself, and upon the mantel the motto which 



114 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

May Alcott, called " Amy " in Little Women, placed 
there. The room with the north light was May's 
studio. When the paper was peeled off, some of her 
penciled sketches were found. In her up-stairs room 
the woodwork is covered with her drawings. The 
windows open upon the elms of the lawn in the room 
where Louisa did much of her writing. It is said that 
in the trimk of one of the trees Hved a family of owls 
which she loved to watch. 

The Hillside Chapel of the Concord School of Phi- 
losophy is up a lane or drive which opens beside the 
house. The trees lap over your head as you walk to 
the little building under the ridge. It is a one-story, 
wooden structure, the boards standing upright, with 
three small windows in each side, an ell angling from 
the lecture-hall, and a pointed doorway. The first 
meeting of the school was held in the Orchard House 
in 1879. Of this event Louisa wrote in her diary: 
" Father has his dream realized at last, and is in his 
glory, with plenty of talk to swim in. People laugh, 
but will enjoy something new in this dull old town; 
and the fresh Westerners will show them that all the 
culture of the world is not in Concord. . . . The town 
swarms with budding philosophers, and they roost 
on our steps like hens waiting for com." 

But the brown building which Louisa Alcott once 
called " Apple Slump," and which looks for all the 
world as though it were dozing under the trees, once 
held a good deal of the learning of America. The pro- 




Tlic Orchard House, Concord 



CONCORD 115 

gramme for the first year contained announcements 
of lectures, in series in most instances, by Dr. William 
T. Harris, the Rev. William H. Channing, Mrs. Julia 
Ward Howe, Dr. EHsha Mulford, Dr. H. K. Jones, the 
Rev. Frederic H. Hedge, Mrs. Ednah D. Cheney, Emer- 
son, Alcott himself, and several others. Vines twined 
their way between the boards of the sides of the build- 
ing, and relieved with green the drab of the interior. 
Plato taught in groves and this was almost as primitive. 
A chapter unique in American history is the story of 
these conferences, which continued until the death of 
their founder. They brought the studious and the cu- 
rious in hundreds to Concord. The last meeting was, 
fittingly, a memorial service for Mr. Alcott. 

Childhood claims Louisa May Alcott for its own, 
and such fame as hers, given without guile and worn 
with honor, is enough to make the Orchard House a 
world shrine. Little Women came in 1868 and rescued 
the family from poverty. She had to dodge into the 
woods to escape the multitude who sought out the 
writer of a book which had captured all readers. Can 
any one understand how she managed to write the 
end oi An Old- Fashioned Girl with " left hand in a sling, 
head aching, and no voice? " When her sister's hus- 
band died, she began Little Men to provide for the 
widow and the boys. To this house Emerson came one 
day with a telegram in his hand. May Alcott, who had 
married a young Swiss, Ernest Nieriker, was dead, and 
the philosopher was asked to soften the blow to Louisa. 



116 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

He said: " My child, I wish I could prepare you; but, 
alas! alas! " and his voice failed, and he gave her the 
message. Emerson had kissed May when she was a 
bride, and Louisa left record that this was enough al- 
most to make matrimony endurable. Upon the death 
of Emerson she said: " I can never tell all he has 
been to me. Illustrious and beloved friend, good- 
bye!" 

What a family was Bronson Alcott's! The father 
was a sage but an impracticable man, unfitted for the 
hard realities of life. Elizabeth, lover of music, was 
the " Beth " of the stories; she died young. May, 
called by her sisters " Little Raphael," was *' Amy." 
Anna was " Meg." And Louisa herself was " Jo." 

The Wayside is beyond the Orchard House, with a 
fine growth of pines intervening. Mr. Alcott had lived 
in it for a time and had called it Hillside. Then Haw- 
thorne bought it, and in a letter to George William 
Curtis he thus described it: 

"... As for my old house, you will understand it better 
after spending a day or two in it. Before Mr. Alcott took it 
in hand, it was a mean-looking affair with two peaked gables; 
no suggestiveness about it and no venerableness, although from 
the style of its construction it seems to have survived beyond 
its first century. He added a porch in front,, land a central 
peak, and a piazza at each end, and painted it a rusty olive 
hue, and invested the whole with a modest picturesqueness; 
all which improvements, together with its situation at the foot 
of a wooded hill, make it a place that one notices and remem- 
bers for a few moments after passing it. Mr. Alcott expended 



CONCORD 117 

a good deal of taste and some money (to no great purpose) in 
forming the hillside behind the house into terraces, and build- 
ing arbors and summer-houses of rough stems and branches 
and trees, on a system of his own. . . . The house stands 
within ten or fifteen feet of the old Boston road (along which the 
British marched and retreated), divided from it by a fence 
and some trees and shrubbery of Mr. Alcott's setting out. 
Whereupon I have called it ' The Wayside.' ..." 

Aside from the fame of its occupants, the house has 
interest also because of the oddities of its architecture.' 
The bay window in the middle front looks like an en- 
trance. To the western wing Hawthorne added two 
stories, and upon his return from Europe in i860 he 
built in the rear three rooms, one above the other, 
making a tower that mounted above the irregular roofs 
of the older and later sections. In this tower's topmost 
chamber, which served to remind him of his tower in 
Florence, he had his study. The room was reached by 
a narrow and steep staircase through the floor. It has 
five windows and a small fireplace. The lofty vaulted 
ceiling conforms to the four gables of the roof. The 
standing desk is still in the room. 

Exterior improvements also were made by Haw- 
thorne. He terraced the steep hillside back of the 
house and planted the terraces with apple trees. A 
large number of Norway firs and spruces which he sent 
from Europe were set out upon the slopes of the hill, 
and to-day they make a screen of almost impenetrable 
shade. A reach of two hundred yards running east and 



118 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

west upon the hill was worn by his feet into the path 
which is called by his name. His son has told of these 
walks : 

" It was his custom to ascend hither in the late afternoon, 
and walk his beat for an hour or two till sunset, his hands 
clasped behind him, and his eyes gazing forward or downward 
abstractedly; occasionally he would pause on the western ex- 
tremity of the path, which commanded a wide view toward the 
Concord meadows, and stand looking out over the sunset clouds. 
During the spring and summer of 1863 — the last summer and 
the last spring but one before his death — his wife used often 
to ascend the hill with him, and they would loiter about there 
together, or sit down on the wooden benches that had been set 
up beneath the larger pines, or at points here and there whence 
glimpses of the vale were to be had. At other times they would 
stroll down the larch path to the brook, where was a pleasant 
gurgle of water, and a graceful dip and shadow of willows, and 
the warble of bobolinks and blackbirds. They were as con- 
stantly together during the last years as during the first of their 
married life at the Old Manse; and they talked much together 
in the low, sympathetic tones that were characteristic of them. 
They were always happy in each other, and serene." 

Beside the ascending path a tablet has been placed, 
cut with these lines: 

" This Tablet, Placed 

At the Centennial Exercises, 

July 4, 1904, 

Commemorates 

Nathaniel Hawthorne. 



CONCORD 119 

He Trod Daily the Path to the Hill 

To Formulate 

As He Paced to and fro 

Upon its Summit 

His Marvellous Romances." 

Hawthorne's walks about Concord may be traced 
in his various note-books. He tells of a stroll to Walden 
with Emerson, and of a ramble in Sleepy Hollow, where 
he found Margaret Fuller, with whom he paused to 
talk, Emerson came upon them there and said there 
were Muses in the woods that day. As in Salem and 
elsewhere, he pondered long over the legends and scraps 
of history associated with the locality. The story of 
the slaying of a British soldier at the North Bridge, 
and some tales about the Wayside told him by Thoreau, 
gave him the basis for his Septimius Felton, the scene 
of which he placed at the Wayside and the Orchard 
House. 

Henry D. Thoreau was bom in an old-fashioned 
and handsome house, a mile from the village, which 
has been removed from its original site and somewhat 
altered. His death took place in what is known as the 
Alcott-Thoreau house, in the midst of the town. The 
projecting ell is the shop in which the family earned 
their livelihood by making lead-pencils and preparing 
plumbago for electrotyping. Lomsa Alcott bought 
the house in 1877, after the death of the last of the 
Thoreau children, and the Alcott family lived in it for 
ten years. In it the mother died, and from it the 



120 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

father went in 1886 to die two years after in 
Boston. 

Thoreau had the instinct for nature. He wandered 
in mighty forests alone. Indians taught him their 
woodcraft. He had even more than their endurance 
and tenacity. The story is told that he once slept in 
a barrel buried in a snow-drift to find out how much 
warmth that kind of bed might afford. Alone much 
of the time, he was never lonely unless he was in the 
midst of the life of the city. He knew much of 
plants and flowers, of insects, birds and animals. The 
chapter on wood sounds in one of his books is a revela- 
tion of the heart of the man. 

The little cabin in which he dwelt on the shore of 
Walden Pond is gone. The site is marked by a cairn 
of stones deposited by the visitors who find pleasure 
in the walk from the town to the pond. He was twenty- 
seven years of age when he borrowed Alcott's axe and 
went out to cut the timber for his hut. He made 
record that he returned the axe sharper than it was 
when he took it to the pond. In the cabin he built he 
lived for eight months at an expense of $8.76. ' ' Walden 
Pond," he said, " might have been covered with myri- 
ads of ducks which had not heard of the fall, when such 
pure lakes sufficed them. . . . The scenery of Walden 
Pond is on an humble scale and although very beauti- 
ful does not approach to grandeur. ... It is a clear 
and deep green well, half a mile long and a mile and 
three quarters in circumference: a perennial spring 



CONCORD 121 

in the midst of a pine and oak woods, without any 
visible inlet or outlet except by the clouds and evapo- 
ration." 

The naturalist and essayist is best remembered by 
the book which he wrote of his two years in this place. 
Walden is still very much the Walden of his day. It 
seems isolated. The gong of the trolley is not heard, 
and the speculator has reared no summer pavilion upon 
its shores, with toboggans into the pond and merry- 
go-roimds and dancing halls. The spirit of the hermit 
has kept unbroken the tranquillity of this peaceful 
spot and saved the fine trees from the spoiler. 

The house of the Concord grape is next beyond the 
Wayside. Ephraim Wales Bull removed to Concord 
in 1836. For years, in a small shop near his cottage, he 
carried on his business as a gold beater, but the major 
portion of his time was given to the culture of the vines 
which he had discovered. With amazing rapidity the 
grape which he developed spread over the country, 
and gave Concord a fame which carried where even the 
names of its authors were not known. Mr. Bull him- 
self came to be forgotten, and he died, broken in spirit, 
in 1895. His epitaph reads: 

" He sowed; others reaped." 

The original Concord vine winds its big folds over 
the lattices of an arbor near the house, but it is over- 
grown and shaded by large trees, producing no fruit. 
A simple board tablet on the arbor has these lines in. 



122 HISTORIC SUMMER PIAUNTS 

worn black letters: ** I looked about to see what I 
could find among our wildings. The next thing to do 
was to find the best and earliest grape for seed, and 
this I found in an accidental seedling at the foot of the 
hill. The crop was abundant, ripe in August, and of 
very good quality for a wild grape. I sowed the seed 
in the autumn of 1843. Among them the Concord was 
the only one worth saving." 

Concord has other places still about which hover 
the memories of her famous people. The last survivor 
of the " Concord circle," Frank B. Sanborn, lecturer, 
author, friend of John Brown and anti -slavery leader, 
lives in a handsome house close to the river. How 
great a delight it is to talk with a man who " has seen 
Alcott hoeing in his garden and Emerson up in an apple 
tree with saw and shears." Tales remain imtold also 
of Emerson's farmer, Edmund Hosmer, of Ellery 
Channing, of Mrs. Lothrop, " Margaret Sidney," who 
also lived at The Wayside, and of many another. One 
is prone to write of this town to-day in the spirit in 
which Emerson wrote his betrothed in Plymouth in 
1835, saying, " I must win you to love Concord." 



THE WAYSIDE INN 

" As ancient is this hostelry 
As any in the land may be, 
Built in the old Colonial day, 
When men lived in a grander way, 
With ampler hospitality; 
A kind of old HobgobUn Hall, 
Now somewhat fallen to decay. 
With weather-stains upon the wall, 
And stairways worn, and crazy doors, 
And creaking and uneven floors. 
And chimneys huge, and tiled, and tall." 

— Henry W. Longfellow. 

There stands the inn to-day, very much as it was 
when Longfellow made it the scene of a modem De- 
cameron, except that the automobiles blaring past on 
the oiled highway have robbed it of much of the " re- 
pose " of which the poet wrote. He described it as 

" A place of slumber and of dreams, 
Remote among the wooded hills! " 

But in the old days its occupants did not altogether 
slumber and dream. Steel-capped troopers used to 
rendezvous in its tap-room almost two hundred years 
ago. Soldiers hurrying to Ticonderoga stopped here, 



124 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

as did the Minutemen from Worcester on their way 
to Lexington. The fine highway of to-day was the 
great mail road from Boston westward, and in stage- 
coach times travelers well knew " How's Tavern in 
Sudbury," later called the Red Horse Inn. 

When Longfellow became acquainted with the inn 
he found the red horse prancing still upon the sign, 
though "half effaced by rain and shine." The poet 
made but two visits here, seemingly, stopping, it is 
likely, as a young man when on his way to New York 
to sail for Europe, and going on an October day twenty- 
five years later to see the house when it had ceased to 
be an inn. Of that visit he wrote in his journal under 
date of October 31, 1862: " October ends with a deli- 
cious Indian-summer day. Drive with Fields to the 
old Red Horse Tavern in Sudbury, — alas, no longer 
an Inn! A lovely valley, the winding road shaded by 
grand old oaks before the house. A rambling, tumble- 
down old building, two hundred years old." He had 
begun the Tales before this, making this entry in his 
journal for October 11 : " Write a Uttle upon the Way- 
side Inn, — a beginning only." 

Restored and solidified, looking handsome yet wear- 
ing an air of age, the inn to-day is an attractive hostelry, 
a museum of interesting relics, and a gallery of pic- 
tures, some having intrinsic or historic value and all 
having associations which make them interesting. A 
big, white, gambrel-roofed block of a building it is, with 
various extensions, and a few additions made by the 



THE WAYSIDE INN 125 

present owner in the interest of the business which must 
support an enterprise which with him is partly commer- 
cial and partly antiquarian. 

At the right of the entrance is the tap-room, looking 
more ancient than any other part of the house. There 
are heavy hanging beams overhead and a worn floor 
beneath. The bar is in one comer, surmounted by a 
wooden lattice screen which used to be triced up when 
refreshments were demanded. They show you the 
desk where the score was kept and the splintered wood 
where was jabbed the bottle-opener. Swords and mus- 
kets are crossed above the fireplace, and old prints 
are hung about the walls. Sitting here in reverie, it 
is rather jarring to be brought back from the scenes to 
which your thoughts have traveled by such remarks 
as this: " The machine did well this morning. I think 
we can make Providence easily by four. Great old 
place, isn't it? " And you realize that stage-coach 
days are over, and that the motor parties about you 
are anxious to have dinner and fare onward. 

More to your Hking is the landlord's statement that 
in winter parties of guests come here, when they can 
have the house almost to themselves, and tell tales and 
make good cheer in the old kitchen, where high-backed 
settles can be drawn before the big, brick fireplace piled 
high with blazing logs. 

The stairs with their worn treads take you to the 
old ballroom, the Lafayette room, and the Longfellow 
room on the second floor. The dance hall would seem 



126 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

small for a modem ball. It is a rectangular white 
room, with a dais at one end for the musicians, a fire- 
place, wooden benches fixed to the walls, chandeliers, 
each holding a dozen or more candles, hanging from the 
ceiling, and a floor of wide yellow boards, worn smooth 
by feet that once tripped in contra-dances, cotillons 
and minuets. Upon one wall has been hung a copy of 
Raphael's La Fomarina and on the opposite wall a 
portrait of Maria Theresa. Tradition has it that La- 
fayette slept in the state chamber when he made the 
triumphal tour which suppHed all New England with 
historical rooms. The old blue-bells paper is on the 
walls still. A small room, opening into the larger cham- 
ber, is supposed to have been used by Lafayette's valet. 
Longfellow is said to have occupied the handsome room 
named for him, and its walls bear several of his por- 
traits and autographs. 

Coming down-stairs to look about in the hall and the 
parlor, you find yourself in the midst of memorials, 
some of which recall the Tales and others the early 
history of the inn. It seems that this was the fifth 
tavern on the road west from Boston, and that it was 
built by David How about 1702. He was one of the 
thirteen children of Samuel How. He called his house 
" How's Tavern in Sudbury " to distinguish it from 
" How's Tavern in Marlboro," kept by his grandfather. 
David's son Ezekiel took the business in 1746, and he 
enlarged the house to a two-story structure, with ex- 
tensions running from each side; and its walls he 



THE WAYSIDE INN 127 

pierced with the then prodigious number of seventy- 
nine windows. He gave it the name " Red Horse; " 
then it was that the steed began to prance upon the 
board hung before the door. When the summons came 
from Lexington, the landlord buckled on his sword, and 
in 1776 he was colonel of militia. Adam How followed 
in the line of landlords in 1796, to be succeeded in 1830 
by his son Lyman, who died in 1861. Lyman was the 
** Squire Howe " of Longfellow. The house was sold 
upon his death and the present owner acquired it in 

1897. 

Lyman Howe was an imposing figure, familiar to 
all the countryside, Hving as a bachelor with a negro 
•servant, driving about in his chaise and seeing his 
business lessen as railroads multiplied. Longfellow 
referred once in a letter to the old EngUsh ancestry of 
which the squire was proud and which accoiinted for 
his coat-of-arms. In the poem he appears as 



Grave in his aspect and attire; 
A man of ancient pedigree." 



His fitting dirge was simg by Dr. Parsons, who 
had been a frequent visitor at the sign of the Red 
Horse. 

" Thunder clouds may roll above him, 
And the bolt may rend the oak; 
Lyman lieth where no longer 
He shall dread the lightning stroke. 



128 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

" Never to his father's hostel 
Comes the kinsman or the guest; 
Midnight calls for no more candles; 
House and landlord both have rest. 



" Fetch my steed! I cannot Hnger. 
Buckley, quick ! I must away. 
Good old groom, take thou this nothing; 
Millions could not make me stay." 

The coat-of-arms is above the fireplace in the parlor. 

" He beareth gules upon his shield, 
A chevron argent in the field. 
With three wolf's heads, and for the crest 
A Wyvern part-per-pale addressed 
Upon a helmet barred." 

A little removed from the coat-of-arms hangs " fair 
Princess Mary's pictured face." Some careless woman 
visitor poked her elbow through the glass some years 
ago, but it has been neatly repaired, and you are likely 
to gaze long at this half-length mezzotint of the daugh- 
ter of George II, by the French engraver Jean Simon. 
There is a spinet in this room on which Miss Jerusha, 
the squire's cherished sister, used to play The Battle of 
Prague, and to whose chords she sang Highland Mary. 
Also you find the portrait of the landlord himself, the 
man into whose mouth Longfellow put Paul Revere^s 
Ride and The Rhyme of Sir Christopher. But 

"... the sword his grandsire bore 
In the rebellious days of yore " 



THE WAYSIDE INN 129 

is not in the house. In a frame appears, however, the 
old window-pane with the "jovial rhymes" flashing 
upon it to which the poet referred. 

" What do you think. 
Here is good drink, 
Perhaps you may not know it, 
If not in haste do stop and taste, 
You merry folks will show it." 

The Hnes were scratched upon this glass in 1774 
by Wilham Molineux, Junior. In his Prelude, Long- 
fellow paid compliment to Hawthorne as having made 
Major Molineux immortal, and the novelist acknowl- 
edged the courtesy in a note written early in 1864: 
" It gratifies my mind to find my own name shining in 
your verse, — even as I had been gazing up at the 
moon, and detected my own features in its profile." 

The world now knows very well the identity of the 
sojourners whom Longfellow grouped in the parlor 
" under the sign of the Red Horse," that he might put 
into the mouths of this new Canterbury company his 
own series of tales. Under the portrait of Dr. Parsons 
there hang some verses written by that member of the 
company whom Longfellow named " the poet: " 

" Blessings on their dear initials — 
Henry W., David V., 
E. and L. ; I'll not interpret — 
Let men wonder who they be." 



130 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

Men do not wonder now. " The student " was 
Henry Ware Wales; " the young SiciHan in sight of 
Etna bom and bred " was Luigi Monti, who married 
the sister of Dr. Parsons; " the Spanish Jew " was 
Israel Edrehi, from whom Longfellow obtained much 
of the rabbinical lore of the Golden Legend; " the mu- 
sician " was Ole Bull, the violinist; "the theologian 
from the school of Cambridge on the Charles " was 
Professor Tread well; and Thomas W. Parsons, the 
translator of Dante, was " the poet." One of the least 
known of this company was Wales; he was graduated 
from Harvard with Lowell in 1838; he came to Long- 
fellow's attention through his love of rare books, and,, 
having lived much abroad, he died at Paris in 1856. 

This parlor is full of pictures and autographs of that- 
company, two of whom, Professor Treadwell and Dr. 
Parsons, came often to the inn. Most interesting of 
all these memorials, perhaps, is the letter from the last, 
survivor of the group, Luigi Monti. The letter, ad- 
dressed to the then new owner of the house, reads thus : 

" Rome, July 4, 1898. 
" I am delighted to learn that you have purchased the dear 
old house and ' carefully restored and put it back in its original 
condition.' ... It is very sad for me to think that I am the 
only living member of the happy company that used to spend 
their summer vacation there in the Fifties; yet, I stiU hope 
that I may visit the old Inn once more before I rejouie those 
choise spirits whom Mr. Longfellow has immortalized in his 
great poem. 



THE WAYSIDE INN 131 

" I am glad that some of the old residents still remember me 
when I was a visitor there with Dr. Parsons (the poet) and his 
sisters, one of whom, my wife, is also the only Uving member of 
those that used to assemble there. . . . ' The musician ' and 
* the Spanish Jew,' though not imaginary characters, were never 
guests at The Wayside Inn. 

" LuiGi Monti, 

"The Young Sicihan." 

Of the portraits in this room there are several of 
Longfellow, some of them bearing his signature, a 
Jenny Lind and an Ole Bull, and a Washington sil- 
houette. A sonnet in autograph by Edna Dean Proctor 
hangs beside her portrait. These are the lines : 

" Set by the meadows, with great oaks to guard. 
Huge as their kin for Sherwood's outlaw grew, — 
Oaks that the Indian's bow and wigwam knew, 
And by whose branches yet the sky is barred — 
Lightning, nor flame, nor whirlwind evil-starred 
Disturbed its calm; but, lapsing centuries through. 
Peace kept its doors though war's wild trumpets blew, 
And still it stands beside its oaks unscarred. 

" Ah, happy hostelry, that Washington 
And Lafayette among its guests can number. 
With many a squire and dame of high renown! 
Happiest that from the Poet it has won 
Tales that will ever keep its fame from slumber, 
Songs that will echo sweet the ages down." 

You may reach the inn by railroad train, stopping 
off at the little Wayside Station, or you may motor 



132 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

from Boston, or from Worcester, a few miles away. 
The walk from the station, a little more than a mile, is 
a more satisfactory approach than is the helter-skelter 
of the usual automobile trip. The walk takes you over 
a winding country road, and through groves of oaks, 
pines and chestnuts, until, a few rods from the inn, you 
emerge upon the oiled road, and soon sight the new 
Red Horse sign which swings before the hostelry. The 
splendid oaks near the house have been remarked by 
nearly all its guests. Dr. Parsons was in a special sense 
the poet of the inn, and of these trees he sang: 

" Ancient Druid never worshipped 
Beneath grander oaks than these; 
Never shadows richer, deeper, 
Than have cast these ancient trees." 



MARBLEHEAD 

" Nature plainly meant Marblehead for a fishing-station; 
she had been beforehand with man, and made ready the way 
in uprearing the cliff and scooping out the rocky inlets. Out- 
thrust aggressively into the bay, shouldering oflf the waters of 
Salem harbor on the left and those of its own miniature basin on 
the right, the ragged headland seems to say to the wide world, 
* Make room for me and my coming brood ! ' And what with 
the bracing air, the flinty soil, and the teeming waters, nowhere 
in the world could have been found a fitter abode for that no- 
table brood." — Edwin Lasseter Bynner. 

Spend an hour in " Old Marblehead " and you will 
like it; spend a whole day in the town, lingering for 
the sunset and the moonlight view of the bay, and you 
will love it. For it is a picturesque and historic hamlet. 
Queer habits of speech and life still cling to some of 
its people. Its gray houses still huddle themselves 
in clusters and hide away behind the granite ledges, 
to the astonishment of the visitor. Boston's streets 
may follow the paths of the colonial cattle, but no 
" calf -path " hypothesis can account for the ups and 
downs and zig-zaggings of the tangle of streets and 
squares of this brine-drenched village. Every fisher- 
man of the early days surely " did what was right in his 
own eyes," at least when it came to building his house. 



134 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

The syenite and greenstone ridges run northeast and 
southwest. The houses were put together with hand- 
wrought iron nails and set down in the valleys between 
the ridges. Thus after all there is no mystery about 
these crooked streets. They merely follow the line of 
least resistance. Many homes were built right against 
the rocks, the fronts showing three stories, one room 
deep below and some of the topmost rooms perched on 
the summit of the ridge. If the main streets followed 
the valleys, the cross streets had to get over the ridges 
at their most vulnerable points. The resulting maze 
is somewhat inconvenient, but so delightful to the eye 
and the fancy that thousands of tourists and artists 
all over the world would protest against any attempt 
in the name of " progress " to straighten the thorough- 
fares of the famous old town. 

No wonder that a well-known preacher, Dr. John 
White Chadwick, said of the men and women whose 
birthplace is Marblehead: " They bless their stars 
that they were bom in such a town." And when you 
learn what Marblehead did in the two wars with Eng- 
land and in the war between the States, and how for 
decades her hardy fishermen fought the sea, you do not 
wonder that he added: " Its natural beauty, its original 
quaintness, of which much survives, its traditions of 
sterling manhood and heroic independence — all these 
are so many hooks of steel that grapple to it the affec- 
tions of its people." 

In the Town Hall, the " Faneuil Hall of Marblehead,'" 



MARBLEHEAD 135 

you may meet an old soldier who will tell you that his 
great-great-great-grandfather fought in King Philip's 
War, his great-great-grandfather in the French and 
Indian War, his great-grandfather in the Revolution, his 
grandfather in the Mexican War, and his father and 
himself in the Civil War. There, too, you may find 
one of the old skippers, who will relate how he and two 
others hoisted the first American flag in the city of Foo- 
chow, where they had been sent for a cargo of tea. He 
says he is seventy-seven and he looks younger, and if 
he fancies you, it may be your fortune to see and handle 
the tea caddy which he brought back from China in 

1853. 

The first settlers pitched their cabins at Peach's 
Point, where in the beating of the Atlantic upon the 
rocks they had a constant reminder of the swash of 
the sea upon the Channel Islands whence they came. 
Fishermen of skill were needed in the infancy of the 
colony. In answer to this demand the men from Guern- 
sey and Jersey crossed the ocean. To them has been 
traced the Marblehead dialect, which rolls the " r," 
pronounces the " i " like " oy," makes the " a " very 
broad, and turns the " v " into " w " and the " w " 
into "v." Whittier's poem of Skipper Ireson gives 
some notion of a manner of speech which was heard in 
Marblehead until quite recent times. Rough these men 
may have been, but they had courage and resourceful- 
ness, and their fishing life was full of the romance and 
poetry of adventure. CHmb the Old Burying Hill and 



136 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

you will appreciate the significance of Marblehead 
in the history of the nation. The men who wrestled 
with the sea for spoil and grappled with England for 
freedom are buried here. They were stout-hearted and 
-warm-hearted in equal degree. The " amphibious regi- 
ment " of the Revolution, and the crew that manned 
Old Ironsides and fought the Guerriere in the " War 
of '12" are among the hamlet's chief titles to 
fame. 

In Abbot Hall hangs the famous painting, " The 
Spirit of '76." It well symbolizes Marblehead. Daunt- 
less, bleeding, but going right on, rugged of face, head 
held high, and eyes flashing battle — that is Marble- 
head. That spirit cost her dear, both in war and peace. 
But Marblehead does not repine. 

" Our mother, the pride of us all, 

She sits on her crags by the shore. 

And her feet they are wet with the waves 

Whose foam is as flowers from the graves 
Of her sons whom she welcomes no more, 

And who answer no more to her call." 

By all means come to Marblehead by boat. Thus 
you get the view of the town from the water, and you 
learn why it is that this bay has come to be the chief 
yachting port of the New World. This harbor is but 
a mile and a half long and half a mile wide. But almost 
.anyivhere a schooner can find anchorage within a few 
feet of the shore. It is one of the deepest harbors on 




Washington Street and Tozvn Hall, Marblehead 



MARBLEHEAD 137 

the Atlantic coast, in which great steamships might 
anchor with safety. The bay is a pouch, closed in upon 
one side by the blimt headland upon which the town 
stands, and upon the other by the strip of land known 
as Marblehead Neck. The sailor skims into the har- 
bor through a passage " clear and open as a church 
door." He slips past the granite cliffs and with scores 
of yachts about him finds as snug an anchorage as ever 
beguiled a modem Ulysses into forsaking for a time his 
quest. 

What a picture is this harbor on a midsummer day. 
There are sonder boats, sailing tenders and puffers, 
knockabouts and cruising cabin launches, two-masters 
and single-stickers, all at home together. That queer 
nondescript belongs to an old fisherman who has trans- 
formed his craft into a house-barge. He discourses at 
length about the rigs of the boats aroimd him, and es- 
pecially of the Block Islander, with no bowsprit or 
topsails, the two masts fitted with schooner sails but 
the foresail having no boom. On the Neck are the 
handsome homes of the Corinthian and the Eastern 
Yacht Clubs. The station of the Boston Yacht Club 
is across the harbor. 

If you cannot come by water, then hurry across the 
harbor ferry and look at the town from the Neck. How 
it sprawls upon the ledges. How precarious a hold its 
buildings seem to have upon their rocky perches. The 
eye traces the streets clambering from the waterside, 
follows the lifting of the roofs one above another, 



138 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

and notes the ladder ways and hewn steps here and 
there. The tower of Abbot Hall and the spire of the 
Old North Church dominate the sky-line. An occasional 
bit of foliage shows green against the gray town and 
the blue sky. And there is a huge sign, Gasolene, sure 
token of the twentieth century. Look long and dream. 
If the day is somewhat misty, why, so much the better. 
The bay, with its pleasure boats tossing at anchor, and 
the old town, with its flavor of the primitive and the 
romantic, suggest the contrast between the present 
and the past. 

Walk about the Neck. From the ocean side there 
is a view of a very different character. " Summer 
people " are stowed away among the rocks, watching 
the tumbling breakers, and staring seaward through the 
haze. Half Way Rock, three miles out, midway between 
Boston and Cape Ann, gets a surf that is flung in foam 
a hundred feet into the air. Upon this rock the out- 
boimd fishermen used to toss coppers for luck, and to 
this spot the boys of the town used to come at risk of 
limb and sometimes of life to salvage those coins. 
Watchers linger for hours at the dike called " The 
Chum," listening to the clashing waves and catching 
an occasional rainbow in the spray. By the harbor 
entrance lie some rocky islets, as if on guard. They 
are rimmed with white foam, with the deep blue of the 
sea showing beyond. The colors are never the same for 
long. They shift and change with every veering of the 
clouds. 



MARBLEHEAD 139 

Watch the scene at sunset and you will no longer 
discoiint the enthusiasm of those who know Marble- 
head well. Yachts are gliding in and stripping their 
masts. Puffing motor-boats show black against the 
swaying lights of anchored vessels, ^ The lighthouses 
are aU agleam — the twin lamps on Baker's Island, Mar- 
blehead Light on the Point, Hospital Point Light at 
Beverly, and away southward the revolving light on 
Minot's Ledge. There are gay parties in all the sum- 
mer houses. But as you quietly watch the waters 
shining in the moonlight, you wiU become aware that 
there are scores of persons who, Hke yourself, find their 
chief pleasure in silently musing over the scene. 

And now for a walk through the town. Near the 
head of State Street on Washington Street is the old 
Town Hall. Every timber in the building, which was 
erected in 1727, must bear some record of stirring 
scenes. In this structure, stiU in an excellent state of 
preservation, town meetings were held and tax ques- 
tions were debated. The first floor has been "the gath- 
ering place of the town's soldiery, whenever America 
has gone to war, for nearly two centuries. Here Colonel 
Azor Ome moved his handful of hearers as deeply as 
did Patrick Henry the burgesses of Virginia. Elbridge 
Gerry became a man of the pen, like Jefferson, his chief, 
but in this building he proved the ability that made 
him a member of the Continental Congress, a governor 
of Massachusetts, and a Vice-President of the United 
States. Up three flights of battered stairs your guide 



140 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

will take you, to the loft under the roof, a small room 
with one circular window, which was the secret meet- 
ing place of Ebenezer Gerry and other patriotic plotters 
against King George. The loft is dingy and dusty now. 
The Grand Army men use it as a storeroom. Right 
fitting it is that the building should be the headquar- 
ters of the veterans. They will tell you stories of the 
wars for hours at a time. Upon the wall they will show 
you a black fragment of wood, the only relic so far 
as known of the great gale of 1846. It is the stem of 
the " Moses " boat of a schooner, and bears in 
worn, yellow letters, the words " Warrior, Marble- 
head." 

That terrible storm came on a day in September. 
You will find the Great Gale Monument on the Old 
Burying Hill, with the site of the Fountain Inn and the 
birthplace of Moll Pitcher under its lee. This cemetery 
is one of the most attractive spots in Marblehead. 
Scrambling over the rocks you might surmise that the 
gravediggers found here rather scant earth for their 
graves. The view is splendid seaward, the languid 
waves swaying indolently in lines of blue streaked with 
white. Landward across the rocks and the roofs are 
the spires of Salem. 

These carved slate tombstones have survived the 
storms of almost two hundred years. Many of the 
inscriptions are long, very long, and quite undecipher- 
able. The modest monument which most of all you 
wish to see has these lines cut upon it : 






f<^^ \>:jhf::t^'l^U 





MARBLEHEAD 141 

" Erected 1848 
By the Marblehead Charitable Seamen's Society 
In Memory of its Deceased Members 
On Shore and at Sea." 

That on one side. On another, with a list of names: 

" LOST 

On the Grand Banks of New Foundland 

In the Memorable Gale of September 19, 1846, 

65 Men and Boys 

43 Heads of Famihes 

155 Fatherless Children. 

' The sea shall give up the dead that were in it.' " 

The other faces of the monument bear the names of 
men lost in the thirties and the forties. 

Every day in the season some tourist reads these 
lists and turns away to muse upon the risks of a calling 
which crushes the cowardice out of its followers and 
pays them more blanks than prizes. 

The story of Agnes Surriage is the lure which will 
take you up the pretty, green-bordered path to the 
yard of a cottage nestling under the shoulder of the 
hill, where you will find the Old Well. Lifting the 
weighted cover, you peer into the cylinder of jagged 
stone which holds to-day perhaps as full a measure of 
water as in the time when it furnished a name for the 
Fountain Inn, in which Sir Harry Frankland's Agnes 
was employed. 

America has very few historical episodes which so 



142 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

lend themselves to the art of the novelist as does the 
tale of the maid of the Fountain Inn. The narrative 
of her life, with but little imaginative embellishment, is 
plot enough for a fiction writer. Two novelists have 
told the story, 

" The old, old story, — fair, and young, 
And fond, — and not too wise, — 
That matrons tell, with sharpened tongue, 
To maids with downcast eyes." 

Standing here by the Old Well, the outline of the 
picturesque tale may be recalled, how Sir Harry Frank- 
land, the new collector of customs for George II., called 
to Marblehead to superintend the building of a fort, 
one day in the autumn of 1742, with a coach and four 
and a liveried servant, drove through the labyrinth of 
streets to the door of the inn, and how the handsome 
young man in gold-lace coat and brocaded vest saw 
scrubbing the stairs a girl of sixteen who was artless 
and very beautiful. The baronet gave her money with 
which to buy shoes for her bare feet; then obtained 
from her parents permission to educate her, and re- 
moved her to Boston, where she gained at least the 
exterior graces and accomplishments of a fashionable 
lady. The girl and her benefactor fell in love with 
each other, but his pride forbade his wedding the 
daughter of a Marblehead fisherman, and Boston so- 
ciety refused to receive her under circumstances which 
exposed her to criticism. Thereupon the collector 



MARBLEHEAD 143 

bought a tract of land in Hopkinton, where he built a 
manor house and Uved for several years in the Virginia 
plantation style with a troop of slaves about him. 

Called to England in 1754, he took Agnes to London, 
but she was treated with disdain by his family and 
friends. He carried her to Lisbon and entered upon 
a gay life in the Portuguese capital. Frankland was 
among the thousands who were buried under the walls 
of fallen buildings in the great earthquake in 1755. 
Agnes ran into the street at the first sign of danger and 
wandered among the ruins until she found her lover. 
The wounded man had made the vows of a penitent, 
while pinned beneath the stones with a dead companion 
by his side, and immediately after his rescue a Roman 
priest married them, and on the way to England an 
Episcopal clergyman performed a Protestant ceremony 

for them. 

So Agnes became Lady Frankland. . 

" No more her faithful heart shall bear 
These griefs so meekly borne, — 
The passing sneer, the freezing stare, 
The icy look of scorn." 

Once more they came to London, and this time 
society welcomed the charming Agnes, and Sir Harry's 
mother relented when she heard the story of the awful 
day in Lisbon. They lived in Boston for a time, and 
again in Lisbon, during Frankland's service as consul- 
general of Portugal. Upon his death in 1768, she re- 



144 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

turned to Hopkinton and Boston. In her dining-room 
in Garden Court Street she helped to nurse wounded 
King's men during the battle of Bimker Hill. As a 
strong supporter of the Crown, she was not popular in 
the Colony, and ere long she sailed again for England. 
Such is the story of the girl whose pretty ankles 
caught the fancy of the gay cavalier near the Old Well 
in Marblehead. Sir Harry's diary is in the Massachu- 
setts Historical Society's library, with this reference 
to his rescue at Lisbon: " Hope my providential escape 
will have a lasting good effect upon my mind." 

" Thus Agnes won her noble name, 
Her lawless lover's hand; 
The lowly maiden so became 
A lady in the land!" 

Leaving the well, and noticing at the entrance of 
Ome Street the " spite house " with its curious exten- 
sions, it is but a few steps to the two-story house, white 
with green blinds, which bears this tablet: 

" Yea Old Brig 
Birthplace of Moll Pitcher 
Erected 1650 a. d." 

Its lines have bulged and sagged, but withal it bears 
its years well enough. It stands amid the rocks, the 
front plain and unadorned, while ells jut from each 
of the rear comers of the main block of the structure. 

Moll Pitcher, the fortime-teller of Lynn, is said to 



MARBLEHEAD 145 

have inherited her gift from her grandfather, who cer- 
tainly must have lived in a time when it was not very 
safe to use powers then attributed to the devil. The 
granddaughter, Mary Dimond, was married to Robert 
Pitcher, a shoemaker, and went to live in Lynn. There 
for half a century she told fortunes. Her clients were 
the rich and educated as well as the ignorant and poor. 
They came to learn of their fortunes in love and busi- 
ness, and to ask about crimes and lotteries. But her 
most numerous customers were those who followed the 
sea, from owner and master to sailor and cabin-boy, 
and it is said that many a ship was deserted on the eve 
of leaving port because of her predictions of disaster. 

The first meeting-house possessed by the town stood 
upon this rocky hill. The records show that Robert 
Knight was " released from paying his town rates dur- 
ing his lifetime for his workmanship done in the meet- 
ing-house in building the galleries." In time the church 
was removed to a less exposed location, and when 
finally it was abandoned, the society built what is 
called " the Old Stone Church " or the North Church, 
in Washington Street. The tablet tells you that the 
First Congregational Church was gathered in 1635 and 
organized in 1684 " for the worship of God and the 
service of man." No church could have a nobler pur- 
pose stated with more telling brevity, one may reflect, 
as he contemplates the ivy-covered building standing 
high above the street, and in front of the ledge from 
which much of its stone was quarried. 



146 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

Differences of opinion over the choice of a minister 
gave Marblehead a second church in 17 14. Some mem- 
bers wanted the Rev. John Barnard and others the 
Rev. Edward Holyoke. Barnard had a majority but 
refused acceptance unless a second church was formed 
with his friend Holyoke as minister. " And it was so," 
reads the record. Then in 1737 Harvard College called 
Barnard to its presidency. He declined and recom- 
mended Holyoke. Holyoke was called, but hesitated. 
Barnard prayed " most powerfully " over his friend's 
problem, and when Holyoke left for Cambridge the 
Second Church people, not pleased over their loss, 
said: " Old Barnard prayed him away." At one time, 
indeed, the location of Harvard College at Marblehead 
was seriously considered. 

Those old town records contain many curious en- 
tries and over some of them one enjoys a hearty laugh. 
For instance, in 1637 John Gatchell was fined ten shil- 
lings for building on the town lands ; but it was agreed 
that half the fine should be abated " in case he should 
cutt off his long har off his head." It was not uncom- 
mon to designate the boundaries of land after this 
manner : " From the bramble bush on the east so many 
feet to the bramble bush on the west," and so on. No 
wonder there was much litigation over land titles. 
Two town trustees once refused to serve, feeling the 
indignity of the measure adopted in town meeting to 
insure the safety of five hundred and fifty pounds which 
had been voted for the improvement of the fort. It 



MARBLEHEAD 147 

was ordered " that the trustees deposit the money in 
one chest with two different locks and keys, the chest 
to be left in the charge of one and the keys to be held 
by the others, and the chest not to be opened except 
in the presence of all three gentlemen." And, let it 
be noted also, these townsmen saw fit to make regula- 
tions as to the size of Marblehead dogs. 

In Summer Street, near the Town Hall, stands St. 
Michael's Church, built in 1714. King's Chapel, in 
Boston, already existed when the frame for the Marble- 
head edifice came across the sea, but St. Michael's 
nevertheless is the one enduring token in New England 
of the Episcopal order of worship that has come down 
from colonial times. The square, low tower is sidewise 
to the street. Under and beside it is its cemetery; 
the stones bear decipherable dates back to 1723, and 
others, older perhaps, have been smoothed away with 
the passing of the years. The exterior of the church 
makes no plea to the tourist. But the interior " sets 
the worshiper a- dreaming of old English churches with 
immemorial yews about them and thick-leaved ivies 
climbing wall and tower." The ancient reredos, 
brought from England ready to set in position, still 
holds its place. There hangs also the first brass chan- 
delier of colonial associations, given the church in 1732 
by the collector of the port of Bristol, England. The 
silver communion service was a gift of the year 1745. 
When the troubled times came, the parish was sorely 
divided. Staunch patriots there were in St. Michael's, 



148 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

and staunch Tories as well, and the rector refused to 
make discretion the better part of valor and continued 
to pray for the royal family long after the Declaration 
of Independence. When the news came that inde- 
pendence had been declared, the excitement ran so high 
that a body of men broke into the church, pulled the 
coat of arms of King George from above the chancel, 
and rang the bell until it cracked. It is said that one 
of the members, fearing that all the books of Common 
Prayer might be destroyed in some riotous outbreak, 
actually wrote out a copy of the entire volume. From 
l8i8 to 1833 the church was in a bad way. The glebe 
lands were sold to pay the parish debts. But when in 
the midst of the Channing movement there was danger 
of its conversion to Congregational uses, the liturgic 
services were re-established. St. Michael's sent one 
of its ministers to New York to become president of 
Columbia College, and another of its rectors, the Rev. 
David Mossum, went from Marblehead to Virginia, 
and there married the Widow Custis to George Wash- 
ington. 

Almost opposite the Old North Church stands the 
home in which Elbridge Gerry was bom in 1744, a 
square house, three stories high, painted white. At 
the foot of the Gerry garden John White Chadwick was 
brought up. He says: " It terminated in a headway 
and fence impossible to climb, and beyond them were 
for me all the infinities and immensities." Elbridge 
Gerry put forward what John Adams regarded as the 



MARBLEHEAD 149 

most important measure of the Revolution, the first 
measure for defensive warfare, proposed in the church 
at Watertown in which the General Court was in ses- 
sion. Probably Gerry is remembered by the majority 
to-day, however, as the originator of the gerrymander. 
He was charged with making over the Essex district to 
meet the emergencies of the political situation. Some 
shrewd eye looked over the map and saw the possi- 
bilities the shape of the new district offered the car- 
toonist. A few touches produced a monster, suggested 
perhaps by the salamander, and multitudes of school 
children, having seen the " gerrymander " once, have 
never been able to forget it. 

A handsome example of the architecture which old 
Marblehead favored is the house in Hooper Street, 
long used for Y. M. C. A. purposes, which bears the 
tablet reading " The King Hooper Mansion, 1745." 
It is a big, rectangular building, recently painted white 
with green blinds, the front heavily clapboarded, and 
the principal door having an enormous knocker. The 
banquet haU within has heard many a toast to the king. 
Wainscoting and paneling indicate the pretensions of 
this early mansion. Robert Hooper was one of the 
richest of New England's merchants before the Revo- 
tion. His name was known in all the chief ports of the 
world. The fishermen gave him the sobriquet " King," 
it is said, because of the simple honesty of his deaHngs 
with them. 

Other houses which should have at least a casual 



150 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

inspection are the " Parson Barnard House " in Frank- 
lin Street; the home of Colonel Azor Orne in Orne 
Street; and the house in Washington Street in which 
Judge Joseph Story was born in 1779. Colonel Orne 
was one of the conspirators who met in the loft of the 
Town Hall. Dr. Elisha Story, father of the jurist, 
made one of the band of Mohawks who spilled the tea 
in Boston harbor. 

But for one house the tourist inquires with every 
likelihood of meeting a rebuff, in spite of the courtesy 
which as a rule Marblehead shows her visitors. Ask 
for the house of Skipper Ireson, and if you get any reply 
at all it will be to the effect that " Marblehead has no 
pride in that house or that story." But the tale is one 
of the best known of all Marblehead yarns, and the 
house stands in Circle Street in that quaint comer 
called " Oakum Bay." Marblehead objects to Whit- 
tier's: 

" Here's Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt, 
Torr'd an' futherr'd an' corr'd in a corrt 
By the women o' Morble'ead! " 

and Marbleheaders have been known to express strong 
opinions in language picturesquely profane about their 
women being depicted as a lot of brawling and ribald 
fishwives. But Whittier can hardly be blamed. A 
local ballad so represented them. The gentle poet said 
in 1880: " My verse was solely founded on a fragment 
of rhyme which I heard from one of my schoolmates, 



MARBLEHEAD 151 

a native of Marblehead. I certainly would not do in- 
justice to any one, dead or living." 

Whatever the facts may be about the writing of the 
poem, and no one would associate the poet with wilful 
unkindness, here is the story of Ben Ireson of the 
schooner Betty. A wreck was sighted at night off 
Cape Cod, when the darkness and the heavy sea made 
rescue impossible. The skipper went below, leaving 
orders to lie by the hulk until morning, but the watch 
disobeyed orders, deserted the wreck, and when they 
returned to Marblehead shielded themselves by laying 
the blame on the skipper. Then came the " ride," on 
a night in 1808 — 

" Body of turkey, head of owl, 
Wings a-droop Hke a rained-on fowl, 
Feathered and ruffled in every part, 
Skipper Ireson stood in the cart." 

But no " wrinkled scolds " or " girls in bloom of 
cheek and lips " had anything to do with that ride. 
Strong men seized the skipper and dragged him about 
town in his smear of tar and feathers. When he was 
released he said: " I thank you for my ride, gentlemen, 
but you will live to regret it." And soon the fishermen 
realized that they had inflicted a grievous wrong upon 
an innocent man. Ireson was not more blameworthy 
than his crew, and perhaps not at all. For years after 
that awful night he managed to earn a living dory- 
fishing in the bay and hawking his catch about in a 



152 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

wheelbarrow. When old age and bUndness came, he 
hauled the dory into the lane by his house and left it 
there to rot and fall in pieces, a sad job for a fisherman. 
The house to-day looks deceitfully young in white 
paint, with the inevitable green shutters for contrast. 

Looking like an inverted goblet, with the stem 
broken off close to the bowl, there stands, out Mug- 
ford Street from the Town Hall, the old Powder House. 
The red brick bowl, in the clasp of the green vines that 
clamber over it, with its padlocked iron door, starts 
poetical fancies in the mind of the observer. The cen- 
tral pillar, projecting through the shingled roof, makes 
the stem of the goblet. This " magazine suitable for 
securing ammunition " was erected by vote of the town 
in 1755, when the French and Indian War began. Pass- 
ing the shoe factory on the way back to the square, one 
rejoices that modem industrial plants have not been 
permitted imduly to intrude upon the antiquities of 
the place. 

The glimpse of the ancient Powder House suggests 
the story of Marblehead in the Revolution. The war 
path will take one to the home of General Glover and 
then to the splendid mansion of Colonel Lee. In the 
little open space off State Street called Glover Square 
stands a white house with gambrel roof, over whose 
simple colonial entrance appears the date " 1762." To 
this house Glover came with his bride in the days im- 
mediately preceding the Revolution. His was the 
famous " amphibious regiment," as Irving called it, 




The Old Poii'der House, Marbleliead 



MARBLEHEAD 153 

the Twenty-first Regiment of Foot of the Province of 
Massachusetts, numbering five hundred and eighty- 
fotir men, of whom all were from Marblehead, except 
one man from Lynn and one captain and five men from 
Danvers. They marched out of the town in June, 1775, 
and the glory of their exploits in the following years 
time has not been able to dim. In Cambridge they 
were lodged in the mansion which became the head- 
quarters of Washington. The Continental Army was 
able to get away from Long Island on that critical night 
in 1776 partly, at least, because the commander-in- 
chief had this marine regiment to call to his aid. And 
on that night of bitter cold when the Delaware was 
crossed and Trenton won. Glover's fishermen rowed the 
patriots across the river and led the advance at the 
battle with fixed bayonets, the locks of their muskets 
being clogged with ice, 

Marblehead is also one of the towns which claims the 
glory of anticipating Lexington and Concord. In 1769 
the British sloop-of-war Rose sent a lieutenant and a 
party of seamen, later reenforced by a detachment of 
marines, aboard a Marblehead brig off Cape Ann, 
to impress some of the crew into the British service. 
For three hours a hand-to-hand fight was waged. Two 
Americans were wounded badly and the British lieuten- 
ant was harpooned to death. 

With alacrity Marblehead took to the water when the 
war began. Just at the railway station stands the little 
monument to Captain James Mugford, the hero of an 



154 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

exploit worthy of Sir Francis Drake. In the face of the 
British fleet lying in Nantasket Roads, his fishing smack 
captured the good ship Hope and took her into Boston 
liarbor with her fifteen hundred barrels of powder, a 
thousand carbines and a lot of artillery carriages. 
"When he fought his way out again, he was killed, but 
liis life cost the British the lives of three score men and 
ten. Marblehead was very proud and very sad the 
following Sunday, when the regiment in which he had 
been a captain followed his body to the grave on the 
Old Hill. 

If Froude had written an American chapter for his 
Forgotten Worthies he would have welcomed with joy 
the stories of such Marblehead mariners as Tucker, 
Boden, Harris and Manly. The first British flag struck 
was yielded to Manly, as he sailed under the Pine Tree 
banner of Massachusetts. Commodore Tucker took 
forty prizes of war. John Adams sailed with him as 
envoy to the court of France. When a sea-fight seemed 
imminent, Adams took his place, gun in hand, with the 
marines. Tucker ordered him below. Adams wished 
to stay on deck and the commodore proceeded to make 
his orders good. Says the racy Chadwick: " As Mr. 
Roads, the invaluable historian of these things, re- 
ports the commodore, his language is more respectful 
than in the tradition which I have received, and less 
objectionable as a breach of the Mosaic law." 

Heavy indeed was the cost of independence to 
Marblehead. In 1772 she had twelve hundred voters 



MARBLEHEAD 155 

and twelve thousand tons of shipping; at the end of 
the war her voters numbered five hundred and her 
shipping totaled fifteen hundred tons. Also she had 
one thousand orphans and five hundred widows in her 
charge. Fishing speedily revived, but although her 
merchants voyaged far they could not regain their 
former prosperity. Gone forever was the prospect of 
Marblehead becoming a great port. 

To the War of 1812, extremely unpopular elsewhere 
in New England, Marblehead, indoctrinated by El- 
bridge Gerry, was thoroughly loyal. Again the hardy 
seamen displayed their valor. In that war for " free 
trade and sailors' rights," over a thousand men of 
Marblehead had part, seven hundred and twenty-six 
aboard privateers and one hundred and twenty in the 
navy. Many Marblehead sailors helped to man the 
Essex on her long and daring cruise. On a day in 18 13 
the Chesapeake and Shannon, in ftdl view of the head- 
lands, fought the battle in which Captain Lawrence lost 
his life. Of the crew of Old Ironsides eighty hailed from 
the town, and the victory over the Guerrihre was claimed 
almost as a local exploit. It also happened that a 
Marblehead merchant was a prisoner aboard the Eng- 
lish vessel at the time of the famous duel. The people 
of the town again crowded to the headland to see the 
great frigate on a Sunday in 18 14, when, with two 
British frigates in chase, the Constitution appeared off 
Marblehead, and Samuel Green brought her safely in 
through the channel. At the end of the war seven 



156 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

hundred citizens of the town were in British prisons, 
five hundred of them at Dartmoor. 

The one name that competes with those of Ome and 
Geny in the eariy annals of Marblehead is that of 
Jeremiah Lee, and his mansion is the best extant proof 
of the prosperity of the town before the Revolution. 
Built in 1768 at a cost of more than ten thousand 
pounds, it was one of the finest and most elaborately 
furnished houses in all the Colonies. Its builder was a 
thriving merchant who died at the very opening of the 
war. In these spacious rooms Washington was enter- 
tained in 1789. To this house also came Monroe in 
18 1 7 and Lafayette in 1824, and here also Andrew 
Jackson met the fishermen who idolized him in 1833. 
Chief Justice Sewall bought the house from the estate 
of its builder, and sold it to the Marblehead Bank in 
1804. In 1909 it was acquired by the Historical So- 
ciety. 

The dimensions of the house are something like one 
hundred feet by sixty feet, and it is three stories in 
height. It was made of brick, over which were placed 
big, beveled clapboards. The designs for the building 
were the work of English architects, and from England 
came the timbers and finish. Investigation of the in- 
terior is satisfying. The oak door swings on hand- 
wrought hinges and opens into a hall of splendid pro- 
portions, running from front to back, its walls paneled 
in mahogany. The staircase starts midway and 
climbs to a mezzanine landing, then turns and ascends 




^ 



h. 



MARBLEHEAD 157 

to a hall above of the same size as the one below. Bal- 
ustrade and banisters, twisted and handsome, are all 
of mahogany. Above the woodwork in the hall and 
in other parts of the house, is the original wall-paper 
which was painted in various designs by a London art- 
ist, making almost a unique distinction for this man- 
sion. At the right of the lower hall is the reception 
room, paneled in white pine, a real architectural gem. 
Across is the banquet room. Old tiles frame the fire- 
places, mostly depicting scenes from Aesop's Fables 
but in one case finding subjects from Hogarth's " Rake's 
Progress." Over the banquet room is the state chamber, 
with a beautiful mantel, and opposite is a bedroom, 
whose paper shows Neptune presiding over a series of 
sea scenes. In one of the rear rooms the paper dupli- 
cates that in the Dorothy Q. house in Quincy. From this 
room runs what was called the secret staircase, a nar- 
row and steep passage to the upper floor. The ceilings 
are lower on the third floor, but the rooms are hand- 
some still. You may climb to the lantern, where you 
will find a seat for a lookout, and you may get under 
the roof to see how the house was framed together. 
Coming down, you note the cornices in some of the 
second-story rooms, and the mahogany wainscoting 
in others, as well as the wide boards with their hand- 
wrought nails which made the original floor of the upper 
hall. The kitchen must not be missed, where there are 
fireplaces and ovens for the entertainment, it is said, 
of a hundred persons at a time, in the days when the 



158 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

builder of the house was dispensing hospitaUty. Be- 
tween the reception room and the kitchen there runs a 
side hall, the door of which opens upon what were the 
quarters of Colonel Lee's slaves. 

Such was the home of one of New England's most 
faithful patriots. Lee, with Gerry and Orne, was at the 
meeting of the Province Committee of Safety and Sup- 
lies at the Black Horse Tavern between Cambridge 
and Lexington on the day before the battle. Hancock 
and Adams went on to Lexington that night, while the 
members from Marblehead remained at the Black 
Horse. In the early morning they made a hurried es- 
cape into a cornfield at the rear while the British were 
surrounding the tavern. The exposure which followed 
brought Lee down with a fever, and he died a few weeks 
later at Newburyport, 

This is Marblehead, beloved of the poet and artist, 
the yachtsman, the tourist and the patriot. Old Fort 
Sewall and the " Pirate's House," so-called; Abbot 
Hall, surrounded by handsome, old-fashioned houses 
and named for Benjamin Abbot, its donor; the Catho- 
lic Church, Star of the Sea, whose cross is at times a 
steering mark for sailors ; these and many other places 
of interest help to make the fascination of the quaint 
old town. Whittier's Evelina Bray came from a simple 
house in Marblehead, and to this State Street home 
the young poet came for his farewell call. The 
popular skit known as Pigs is Pigs might well have been 
bom of the story of a co-operative enterprise of 1850 



MARBLEHEAD 159 

for the propagation of rabbits on Brown's Island. One 
of the youthful partners says: " It was so successful 
that nothing I have read about the multiplication of 
these creatures in California and Australia has caused 
me the least surprise." 

Prosperous and populous a century and a half ago, 
Marblehead to-day blends the new-fangled and the 
old-fashioned most curiously and happily. Where once 
were fishing smacks, privateers and merchantmen, 
now are only pleasure craft. The harbor alone has al- 
tered not at all, — the harbor and the rocks which shut 
it from the ocean. But the coming of the trolley and the 
electric light have made so small a change that Long- 
fellow might see to-day 

"... the port. 
The strange, old-fashioned, silent town, 
The light-house, the dismantled fort, 
The wooden houses, quaint and brown," 

much as he saw them from the Devereux farm across 
the bay fifty years ago. 



GLOUCESTER 

" On reef and bar our schooners drove 

Before the wind, before the swell; 
By the steep sand-cliffs their ribs were stove, — 

Long, long their crews the tale shall tell! 
Of the Gloucester fleet are wrecks three score; 
Of the Province sail two hundred more 

Were stranded in that tempest fell. 

The bedtime bells in Gloucester Town 
That Sabbath night rang soft and clear; 

The sailors' children laid them down, — 
Dear Lord ! Their sweet prayers couldst Thou hear? 

Tis said that gently blew the winds; 

The good wives, through the seaward bUnds, 
Looked down the bay and had no fear." 

— Edmund Clarence Stedman. 

A CITY of far- voyaging schooners, of seines and nets 
and fishing lines, of herring and halibut, cod and mack- 
erel ; a city whose prosperity is the spoil her rugged sons 
wrest from the sea with which they battle; a city of 
orphans and widows, and of wives and children whose 
hearts are always fearful lest the ship shall come back 
with the flag at half-mast — that was Gloucester, and, 
in degree, is Gloucester still. But there is another 
Gloucester — a city of trolleys and telephones and in- 
candescents, of paved streets and tenements, modem 



GLOUCESTER 161 

enough to have a foreign population, and, in summer, a 
great colony of cottagers. The old Gloucester by no 
means is gone; the new Gloucester has not wholly ar- 
rived. The two are intermingled. The fishing fleet beat 
out of the harbor, one hundred and two hundred strong. 
They go to the Banks, and not infrequently schooners 
venture to Labrador, Iceland, Greenland and Norway. 
Every year some lives are lost. Occasionally the storms 
take so many that State Street and Wall Street pause 
in their scanning of the papers to comment upon the 
perils of the fisherman's calling. No memorial day is 
more impressive than Gloucester's midsummer cere- 
monial, when her children cast flowers for the dead upon 
the receding tides of the harbor. No bride could enter 
upon life with more risk of early widowhood than does 
the bride who marries a fisherman " out of Gloucester." 
It is still a city of sorrow, whose history, some one has 
said, is written in tears. 

Yet while Gloucester is still a fishing city, it is not the 
city of old. Science and invention have come to the 
aid of the fisherman. Chemistry uses the wastes of his 
business. Machinery is doing what labor once did. 
Young people are working over the by-products of the 
catch. The market for the fish is certain. Refrigerator 
cars distribute the product throughout the country. 
Above all, a new motive power is on the way to super- 
sede sails. The Gloucester natives own the fishing 
vessels, but many of them are manned these days by 
Portuguese. These fishermen from over seas are thri- 



162 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

ving, and the industry and home love of their wives the 
whole Cape holds in admiration. In the future Glouces- 
ter will have her heroes, but their risks will not be so 
many ; and the number of those who sail out and never 
return will not be so great. 

For two hundred and fifty years Gloucester grew 
very slowly; since 1875 her growth has been remark- 
able. Strange as it may seem to the tourist who climbs 
about on the rocks of the Cape, the early settlers went 
to farming, and it is a curious fact that in 1727 some of 
the inhabitants went to Salem, because there were not 
enough farms to go around. Then the people took to 
cutting wood and sending it to market in the boats 
built in the harbor. When the timber supply was ex- 
hausted, these vessels were changed into fishing boats. 
The industry was not very successful, and for some 
time the town barely made a living out of it. But the 
original families meantime had married and inter- 
married. There had been only slight infusion of new 
blood. The Gloucester breed became a race as rugged 
as their Cape, indomitable and patriotic. They re- 
sponded freely to the calls of war, even though the Rev- 
olution ruined their fishing industry. The foreign 
trade left the port as the lumber trade had gone. Then, 
about i860, came the turn of the tide. The demand for 
fish increased. New and better fishing grounds were 
found. Boats and gear were improved. Men saw their 
chance, took larger hazards, and reaped greater and 
greater rewards. Small boats making trips of one, two 







^ 



GLOUCESTER 163 

and three days have dwindled in number. The Banks 
voyages have made capital and capitalists necessary. 
And the first fishing boat with auxiliary power appeared 
in 1900. 

Entering Gloucester harbor, you pass on the left the 
formidable reef called Norman's Woe, where the 
schooner Hesperus was wrecked, according to the poem, 
and vessels of other names have come to their end, ac- 
cording to the historians. However peaceful the sea 
may be, it moans upon these rocks and lashes out at the 
small boat that ventures near. Woe be unto the ship 
that is caught as was the schooner in the poem. 

" And fast through the midnight dark and drear, 
Through the whistling sleet and snow, 
Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept 
Tow'rds the reef of Norman's Woe. 

" And ever the fitful gusts between 
A sound came from the land; 
It was the sound of the trampling surf 
On the rocks and the hard sea-sand. 



" She struck where the white and fleecy waves 
Looked soft as carded wool, 
But the cruel rocks, they gored her side 
Like the horns of an angry bull." 

Come you by boat or by train, first of all go over to 
East Gloucester and from Rocky Neck look across at 
the city. The harbor is full of boats. " PufTers " are 
spluttering about. There are vessels with masts and 



164 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

without masts, motors with seine-boat and small skiff 
in tow, old-fashioned bowsprit schooners, and spick- 
and-span steam yachts flying blue anchor flags. That 
motor taking fuel from the gasolene schooner anchored 
in mid-harbor is off for " blue backs." Over there is the 
one square-rigger in sight, an Italian salt boat. These 
ships and brigs that occasionally come into Gloucester 
harbor recall the times when Cape Ann had a fleet of 
square-riggers that sailed to the East Indies and South 
America and Europe, in the days when merchandise 
from all parts of the world was piled high upon her 
wharves. To-day Gloucester needs salt for the curing 
of fish, and the few square-rigged vessels that appear 
are likely to have salt packed in their holds, and some- 
times so tightly that sailors have to mine it out with 
pick and shovel. There are freight steamers also in 
the salt trade plying between the Cape and Cadiz. 

The boat which Gloucester may claim as her very 
own is the schooner. Schooners and American Univer- 
salism were bom in this town. In the early days the 
pink, pointed at both ends and having no bowsprit, 
was the Gloucester craft. Then in 17 13 Captain An- 
drew Robinson invented a new kind of vessel. It had 
gaffs instead of lateen yards, and the luff of the sails 
was bent to hoops on the masts. As she slid down the 
ways on launching day some sailor cried: " Oh, how 
she scoons," and a schooner that type of boat has been 
ever since. 

Lining the shores of the harbor you note the acres of 



GLOUCESTER 165 

long racks upon which barrow-loads of fish are being 
spread. The sun is hot, so that long stretches of white 
canvas covers are soon rippling and billowing in the 
wind. The cod and the mackerel, as soon as they have 
been cleaned, go to these flakes to be dried in the sun. 
There they lie, split double every one, in long and glis- 
tening rows. Once dried, they will be packed in every 
shape and style for shipment to markets all over the 
world. They come to the kitchen boneless and shredded 
and as prepared fishballs ready to serve after a little 
warming. 

You study the profile of the city across the bay. 
Away at the left the green hills slope to Half Moon 
Beach. Yonder is Fort Square, where the fresh fish 
industry centers. Harbor Cove is full of boats, with 
two-story frame buildings and sheds huddled about it. 
Above it the trees make a background of green, and 
above them soars the spire of the old Universalist 
Church. Your eyes travel on to the right, where ap- 
pear coal wharves and hoists, and halibut-company 
and other fish signs, and a line of docks clear around 
the sweep of the inner harbor. The brick walls of the 
business buildings and the spires of the churches and 
the City Hall tower make the high points of the pic- 
ture. Farther on there are dwelUngs perched one above 
another upon the slope, some of them square-framed, 
three-story structures, of which there are a large num- 
ber in Gloucester. And away at the extreme right is 
the curve which shuts in the harbor. 



166 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

An old man joins you upon the rocks where you sit. 
Evidently he is a superannuated fisherman, loving to 
dream over the past and to talk about the great catches^ 
the awful storms and the high tides which have been 
part of his experience. Thomas Wentworth Higginson 
once wrote: 

" I know of no class of uneducated men whose talk is so apt 
to be worth hearing as that of sailors. Even apart from their 
personal adventures and their glimpses of foreign lands, they 
have made observations of nature which are far more careful 
and minute than those of farmers, because the very lives of 
sailors are always at risk. Their voyages have also made them 
sociable and fond of talk, while the pursuits of most men tend 
to make them silent; and their constant changes of scene, al- 
though not touching them very deeply, have really given a 
certain enlargement to their minds." 

From this incidental companion you learn a great 
deal. His manner is simple as a child's, but his eyes 
have the look you saw in the eyes of the steersman of 
the revenue cutter's life-boat. You learn that his grand- 
father was at Bunker Hill. He tells you that in 1873 
Gloucester lost twenty-eight vessels and one hundred 
and seventy- three lives. He spins yams of gales in 
which Gloucester schooners delight, but which would 
make a passenger steamship dizzy. You have side-lights 
upon the uncertainties of the old-time trade, how the 
fisherman chased hopes that deluded and evaded him, 
endured cold and ice, ventured life and limb, and all 
for a floating doubt. It is good to learn that- 



GLOUCESTER 167 

some portion of the profits of the catch goes to the 
Widows' and Orphans' Fund. 

You question as you listen if this man of seventy- 
three would at any time in his career of danger have 
exchanged his trawl for a plow, his boat for a farm. 
Not he. He wonders at your wonder. Then he re- 
marks: "I've known folks come from the West and 
sit down on those rocks and just watch the water and 
the boats. It's a treat for 'em. They never saw nothin' 
before." Clambering back and up the road with him, 
he shows you his house. Then you get a disclosure of 
a new side of his character. One part of the building is 
banked with clematis. He calls your attention to it. 
" Ain't it pretty? " he asks, and watches your face 
to make sure that you appreciate the simple but 
beautiful floral display. 

Clamber about the peninsula that makes East 
Gloucester. There are hotels of ornate style along the 
ocean front. Houses are ensconced among the rocks. 
They are painted green, with pretty curtains and flower 
boxes at the windows. Most of their names are de- 
rived from the sea, The Anchorage, The Ledges, The 
Moorings, even The Steerage. Along the roads, over 
which automobiles are swarming, signs appear at in- 
tervals, pointing the way to artists' studios and antique 
shops. Almost every house has its staff and flag. This 
is the region of the summer people. Once it was gloomy 
and desolate. Now roads traverse it in every direction 
and golfers are busy on the links. 



168 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

The cottage of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, for which 
you have been looking, seems so sad in its loneliness, 
now that its owner is gone, that you are almost sorry 
you found it. There is the study, a little to one side, in 
which she wrote her stories of Gloucester life and from 
-which she made her pleas for a hospital for a city in 
which she had found so much sorrow. 

The wild roses of Cape Ann are all about here, nes- 
tling in every cranny of the rocks. Of such roses Lucy 
Larcom wrote: 

" A rose is sweet, no matter where it grows: 



But our wild roses, flavored by the sea, 
And colored by the salt winds and much sun 
To healthiest intensity of bloom — 
We think the world has none more beautiful." 

The view from Eastern Point is superb. The point 
makes the barrier which creates the harbor. Down the 
coast on a fair day keen eyes make out Plymouth. The 
shore of the Point reaches away to Thacher's Island, 
where Anthony Thacher lost his ship and his children 
in 1635. It now has two needle-like lighthouses and 
a fog-horn which booms its warning in bad weather. 
On a clear, bright day, as you see a fisherman coming 
in from the northeast, you will find yourself almost as 
happy in watching him as he is in getting safely home. 
He passes the red buoy on the Dog Bar. Then he has 
a clear course in past Ten Pound Island. On the Dog 



GLOUCESTER 169 

Bar breakwater there is a light on stilts. And on the 
rocky islet is the United States fish hatchery. Long 
the sea scenes from this point of vantage will hold you 
captive. 

" Amid these sweeps of shore and sky, 
Of shaded lane and upland free, 
And rocks that like dead Titans lie, 
And shifting pictures of the sea, 

" It is but right that one should give 
Homage from pencil or from lips. 
For here in weird sea-change we live, 
Our fancies sailing with the ships." 

Although to-day, in the thriving city of Gloucester, 
prosperity has obUterated a great number of interest- 
ing antiquities and fires have devastated large areas 
once covered with quaint and beautiful old houses, a 
good many buildings still remain which are suggestive 
of the past. The streets angle and curve about, and 
climb hills only to come down them again, ascending 
from the water-front by steep incHnes, sometimes with 
the assistance of flights of steps, and dominated in their 
general course by Rogers Street and Main Street, which 
in turn had to conform their curves to the shape of the 
harbor. What a pity it is that for such names as Fore 
Street and Comhill the meaningless Middle Street and 
Main Street were substituted! 

Every type of colonial doorway may be seen in 
Gloucester, and balustraded fences, the posts topped 



170 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

with big white balls, are not uncommon. Many a back 
yard is full of sunflowers. Everywhere you go, how- 
ever, you come upon shops which have to do with the 
fishing industry, spar shops, seine lofts, block shops, 
sailmaker's shops, shops dealing only in oil clothing 
and shops which handle outfits entire. Strolling about 
the city, you will be likely to conclude that the typical 
house of the city's older days must have been the three- 
story frame with a hip roof gently slanting from the 
center point to the four sides, and sometimes decked 
and balustraded. 

In Middle Street there are several houses which will 
catch the eye. One of these is the " Revolutionary 
House," set side wise to the pavement, and having two 
tremendous chimneys, one of which is warped so out 
of plumb that it seems a wonder it does not come down 
in a shower of bricks. At the rear is a one-story exten- 
sion which has little port-hole windows. The entrance 
is through a gate set in paneled brick walls. The in- 
terior is as handsome as any house on the Cape. The 
property once belonged to the widow Judith Stevens, 
whom Murray, the founder of Universalism in America, 
married. Also in this street, and opposite each other, 
are the houses erected respectively by the Rev. John 
Rogers in 1775 or thereabouts and the Rev. Samuel 
Chandler about 1752. 

The Sawyer Library occupies a handsome old man- 
sion erected in 1764. Out at Annisquam are several 
ancient buildings, the Briggs house, whose antiquity 



GLOUCESTER 171 

probably antedates that of any other structure on 
Cape Ann, and the Dennison house among them. The 
gambrel-roofed Babson house has been well kept for 
many years. It is filled with interesting old furniture, 
and under the gables are the pens once used for slaves. 
Various houses are referred to generally as " Somes 
Houses," from certain sea-captains of the name; two 
of them are on opposite comers of Pleasant and Federal 
Streets. At West Gloucester are the Stanwood house 
on the Point, which is very old and looks its age, and 
Byle's Tavern at the entrance to Beachbrook Cemetery. 
The EUery house, dated 1705, has a second-story over- 
hang. 

Near the " Revolutionary House " is the historic 
Universalist Church. Before it is an open, green, 
parkhke area crossed by a wide walk from Middle 
Street to the church door, and shaded by splendid elms 
which reheve somewhat the simple austerity of the 
exterior of the building. This " Independent Christian 
Church, Universalist " was built in 1807. It is a large 
wooden structure on a brick foundation, with handsome 
pillars about the entrance and a tower of the Wren 
box-upon-box type, which, with the tower of the Mu- 
nicipal Building, dominates the city. 

This was the original home of Universalism in Amer- 
ica, and Gloucester is to-day the Mecca of the faith of 
the founder, the Rev. John Murray. It seems that in 
1774 a few residents of Gloucester heard that in Boston 
Mr. Murray was preaching the doctrines which their 



172 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

reading of James Relly's writings had taught them to 
favor, and they sent one of their number to ask him to 
visit them. But strife and bickering and persecution 
followed the preaching of the Universalist gospel in 
Gloucester. Murray's followers were publicly sus- 
pended from the church. Thereupon, on January i, 
1779, to the number of sixty-one persons, they organ- 
ized as "an independent church of Christ, resolved by 
God's grace, whether blessed with the public preaching 
of the Word or not, to meet together and supplicate 
the divine favor, to praise our Redeeming God, and to 
hear his Most Holy Word." 

There followed a contest in which the Gloucester 
society of Independents vindicated the rights of many 
another church and denomination. The First Parish 
levied a tax upon the leading Independents. The In- 
dependents claimed that they were free from parish 
rule and ecclesiastical control. In 1782 the parish 
seized and sold at auction the goods of three of the 
Independents, some English goods of one, some silver 
plate of another, and the anchor of a vessel about to 
sail which belonged to a third. Also a fourth who 
refused to pay was lodged in Salem jail. In 1786, 
however, the courts gave a decision which made such 
seizures impossible thereafter. But action was once 
more brought against the Independents because they 
were not incorporated. Compelled therefore to peti- 
tion the Legislature, the Independents in 1792 were 
granted incorporation. 



GLOUCESTER 173 

The Rev. John Murray had been chaplain inNa- 
thanael Greene's Rhode Island regiment, and had left 
the army because of ill health. The first meeting- 
house of the Gloucester Independents was a diminu- 
tive frame building, looking very much like a typical 
country schoolhouse of the older kind. Its dedication 
took place in 1780. The music was supplied by a 
crank organ which Captain John Somes had taken 
from a captured British frigate. The old organ is now 
an object of curiosity to most visitors to Gloucester. 

The First Parish Church in the same street is now 
Unitarian, the opponents of Murray having announced 
their secession from the orthodox faith in 1837. Among 
the original covenanters was Gloster Dalton, a negro. 
On his death Parson Thomas Jones entered on the 
church record this notice: 

" April II, 1813, Gloster Dalton, an African. In this country 
from a youth. Supposed to be ninety years old, or upwards. 
The said Gloster Dalton was an honest, industrious man. He 
had been infirm for two or three years. He was a believer in 
Jesus Christ, the Savior of the World, and belonged to the In- 
dependent Christian Society for many years. He was a native 
of Africa, and was brought away as a slave, (so-called). 

" For there are no slaves! AU men are born free! 

"T. Jones." 

And this entry also has brought distinction to 
Gloucester. 

All Cape Ann is picturesque, and one who has zest 
for scrambling among the rocks will find his muscles 



174 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

quite tired enough after a day of climbing over and 
among the boulders. One boy visitor has suggested 
that if the giants of old had tossed rocks about after 
the snowball fashion of school boys and the rocks had 
remained just where they happened to lodge, the pres- 
ent aspect of the Cape would have some intelligible 
explanation. " The whole interior of Cape Ann be- 
yond Gloucester," said Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 
" is a continuous woodland with granite ledges every- 
where cropping out, around which the highroad winds, 
following the curving and indented line of the sea, and 
dotted here and there with fishing hamlets. I know of 
nothing more wild than that gray waste of boulders; 
it is a natural SaUsbury Plain, of which icebergs and 
ocean currents were the Druidic builders." 

How delightful are the names of the locaUties all over 
this region — Annisquam, or Squam, which some say 
was the original name before which the prefix Ann's was 
placed, Bass Rocks, Land's End, Pigeon Cove, Folly 
Cove, Halibut Point, Loblolly Cove and Rockport. 
In the wake of her fisheries is coming another industry 
to give Gloucester fame, the quarrying of granite. 
The Finns have a village of their own, with church, 
entertainment hall, teachers and doctors. The Italians 
on the Cape also cling to home habits, and the alert 
ear sometimes catches bits of Neapolitan songs. The 
Italians prove here as elsewhere their ability with the 
chisel. Saint Ann's Church, whose lofty cross serves as 
a mariner's beacon, got its granite from these quarries. 



GLOUCESTER 175 

No wonder Captain John Smith was beguiled by 
this wild coast and bestowed upon it a name which re- 
called a romantic incident in his own adventurous 
career. The redoubtable explorer had his Pocahontas 
who saved his life in Virginia ; he also had a princess in 
the Mohammedan East who aided him to escape from 
prison. For this princess, whom he called Charatza 
Tragabizanda, which may mean Charatza of Trebi- 
zond, he gave to the rocky promontory the name Cape 
Tragabizanda. And the three islands off the Cape he 
called the Three Turks' Heads, recalling thus an ex- 
ploit in which he proved his prowess by cleaving away 
the heads of three Mussulmans in single combat one 
after the other. But while this wanderer voyaged from 
Penobscot to Cape Cod in an open boat, it cannot be 
shown that he actually landed upon Cape Ann. 

There did land here, however, an earlier voyager, 
the founder of Quebec. In 1605 Samuel de Champlain 
dropped anchor off shore and met and danced with the 
Indians, and when he departed he gave the place the 
name Le Beau Port — the Charming Harbor. Finally 
Prince Charles bestowed the name which has endured, 
Cape Ann, in honor of his mother, Anne of Denmark. 

Strangely enough, when a party came here from Dor- 
chester some years later, they failed to establish them- 
selves permanently, and one of them referred to the 
" ill choice of the place for fishing! " But John Smith 
had urged England to set up a fisheries plantation here, 
and with the enthusiasm of an angler he went on record 



176 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

thus: " Is it not pretty sport to pull up two pence, six 
pence, or twelve pence as fast as you can hale and veare 
a line? And what sport doth yeeld a more pleasing 
content than angling with a hooke and crossing the 
sweete ayre from He to He, over the silent streames of 
a Calm Sea? " 

The Rev. Richard Blynman and his friends in 1642 
came to repopulate Cape Ann. Many of the men were 
from the English city of Gloucester, and they used the 
old name for their settlement. In a few years they have 
made mackerel a legal tender for the payment of debts. 
Rock and wind and sea begin the long toughening 
process for the men of the Cape. For a century the 
region is out of the way, a little to one side, and it comes 
to be a land of mystery, so that one account has it that 
lions could be seen at Cape Ann. But Gloucester mari- 
ners were taking fish to the West Indies, Portugal and 
Spain, and coming back with sugar, molasses, coffee, 
salt and liquors. There were Gloucester fishermen at 
Louisburg and Crown Point, and, tradition has it, with 
Wolfe at Quebec. Right pleasing it is to learn, too, that 
some of the Acadian exiles found refuge here, and that 
for a time they were cared for at the expense of the 
town. 

Gloucester placed a share of brave deeds to her 
credit in the Revolution, as did all the other towns 
on the coast. A typical story is that of the British 
sloop-of-war Falcon, which entered the bay, bombarded 
the town for a while, and got so warm a reception that 



GLOUCESTER 177 

a hurried retreat was in order. The only casualty is 
said to have been endured by Deacon Kinsman, whose 
hog was killed. And the veracious historian relates 
that the bill against the town that night at the tavern 
was for thirteen buckets of toddy, five suppers and two 
quarts of rum. 

There's a deal of superstition yet clinging to some of 
the Gloucester fisherfolk. They nail horseshoes to 
their masts for luck and believe implicitly in signs. 
There may still be found those who resent any discredit- 
ing of the tale of the old witch Peg Wesson, how she 
threatened the men who were starting for Louisburg 
and appeared to them there as a raven. Shots harmed 
the bird not at all. Then a soldier remembered that 
only a bullet of precious metal could harm a witch. 
He fired away again, and the silver sleeve buttons 
which he used for bullets brought the raven down. 
At the same hour in Gloucester, Peg Wosson fell and 
■broke her leg, and when the doctors examined the 
wound out dropped the silver buttons. 

Captains Courageous and Out of Gloucester are the 
stories to read if you would understand the spirit of 
this people. A tale which well illustrates the uncer- 
tainties of the life they lead is that of the very end of 
a voyage to the Banks made by a certain schooner some 
years ago. Eight dories left the ship on the last day of 
the season. In one of the boats was the captain's son 
and the brother of his wife. A thick bank of fog blotted 
out sky and sea. Then a storm began to blow and the 



178 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

waves to roll high. For hours dories searched the fog 
for the one boat which did not find the way back to 
the ship. Fog-horns blew incessantly. When the fog 
lifted, there came out of the northeast a severe gale, 
with ice in every blast. And for two days the schooner 
sailed here, there, everywhere, making a trail over scores 
of square miles of water. 

It was hopeless. The captain at last abandoned the 
quest. The schooner headed for — home. In three 
days the skipper had aged by years. For five hundred 
miles the boat sailed straight for Gloucester. She came 
in with flag at half-mast. To their astonishment she 
was greeted with cheers and blowing of whistles. And 
at last they saw and understood. For there on the 
wharf was the wife of the captain with her boy and her 
brother on either side. At the very last hour when 
rescue would save their lives, a tramp steamer had 
picked them up and carried them to Boston. 



SALEM 

" Ah me, how many an autumn day 

We watched with palpitatmg breast 
Some stately ship, from India or Cathay, 

Laden with spicy odours from the East, 
Come saiUng up the bay ! 
Unto our youthful hearts elate 
What wealth beside their real freight 

Of rich material things they bore! 
Ours were Arabian cargoes, fair, 
Mysterious, exquisite, and rare; 

From far, romantic lands built out of air 
On an ideal shore, 

Sent by Aladdin, Camaralzaman, 

Morgiana, or Badoura, or the Khan. 
Treasures of Sindbad, vague and wondrous things 
Beyond the reach of aught but Youth's imaginings. 

" How oft, half-fearfuUy, we prowled 
Around those gabled houses, quaint and old, 
Whose legends, grim and terrible. 
Of witch and ghost that used in them to dwell, 
Around the twihght fire were told." 

— William Wetmore Story. 

"Hawthorne was related to his background as closely as 
flower to root, so naturally did he grow from it and so truly 
did he represent it to the beholder's eye." 

— Charles F. Richardson. 



180 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

The peculiar spell of age and beauty can be expe- 
rienced as thrillingly and completely in Salem as in 
any city of New England. Travelers familiar with 
lands across the ocean have found this ancient town 
more satisfying than many of the show places of Eu- 
rope. Great cathedrals and mediaeval castles become 
professionally historic. Also they carry the observer 
so far back into the past that he loses the sense of re- 
lationship with them. His imagination does not easily 
carry far enough on " the road to yesterday " to link 
the conditions of thought and life of the times when 
men reared those overwhelming masses of stone with 
the social conditions and the habits of thought and 
action of to-day. 

Then, too, in Salem, owing perhaps to the salty air 
of the sea, the exceptionally large number of old build- 
ings, which, happily, have been permitted to survive, 
seem as antiquated as those of many foreign cities 
three times their age, and they do not bafHe the visitor 
who would know the story of their origin, their succes- 
sive occupations, and their vicissitudes of " improve- 
ment " and alteration. These things are true of Salem, 
in spite of all that steel and stone, electricity and steam, 
have done to make it a modem industrial center. The 
town holds its history in reverence, and the buildings 
which have been preserved appeal to the visitor with 
impressive cumulative effect. 

Salem's witchcraft, Salem's commerce, Salem's as- 
sociations with Hawthorne, and Salem's colonial archi- 



SALEM 181 

tecture, — these make the attraction of the city. Sto- 
ries of that reign of terror, the witchcraft era, force 
themselves upon the attention, A sinister charm have 
the tales of that strange delusion, when children were 
divided from parents and husbands from wives by fear 
and credulity, and innocence was the last security for 
the accused. But Gallows HiU and the documents and 
pins in the court-house stand for a belief that was 
almost universal in that day, and show how relentless 
was the combat fought by the Puritan with that per- 
sonal devil whom he feared far more than any danger 
of the wilderness. 

Among the American streets of splendid memories 
the right of Derby Street in Salem to that rather high- 
sounding title will not be denied, for it runs along the 
harbor front and recalls the fifty years when the city 
was the greatest center of ocean enterprise this side the 
Atlantic. The seal of the city indicates her pride in 
her maritime achievements — Divitis Indiae usque ad 
ultimum sinum, To the farthest port of the rich East. 

Salem ships made the name of their port a synonym 
for America on the other side of the world in the early 
part of the last century, much as World's Fair adver- 
tising made Chicago and America one and the same to 
the remotest peoples of Africa at the end of the century. 
Froude's words about the " forgotten worthies " of 
England come again to mind: " Wherever we find 
them they are still the same. In the courts of Japan 
or of China, fighting Spaniards in the Pacific, or pris- 



182 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

oners among the Algerines, . . . exploring in crazy 
pinnaces the fierce latitudes of the Polar Seas, they are 
the same God-fearing men whose Hfe was one great 
liturgy." For these men of Salem were held in prison 
in France, England, Spain and Algeria. They fought 
pirates in the East and cannibals in the Pacific. When 
a Salem ship made her first voyage to the Cape of 
Good Hope in 1784, her "guidebooks" were some 
maps and charts which were largely drawn by guess, 
a sextant and a Guthrie's Grammar. Salem's mariners 
were in Japan fifty years before Commodore Perry and 
at Guam a full century before Uncle Sam added that 
lonely outpost to his Pacific picket-line. Heavy laden 
argosies from the rich and mysterious Orient came al- 
most daily to her wharves. And as to her prowess in 
war — Salem's privateers did more damage to British 
shipping in the Revolution than was done by those of 
all other American towns together. 

Hawthorne was not an admirer of Salem, but in 
Salem he was bom and in Salem he lived, almost as a 
recluse, for years. Said he: "I sat down by the way- 
side of life, like a man under enchantment, and a shrub- 
bery sprang up around me, and the bushes grew to be 
saplings, and the saplings became trees, until no exit 
appeared to be possible through the entangling depths 
of my obscurity." But he wrote very much of Salem, 
of her " Main Street," — Essex Street, that is, — the 
custom-house, the town pump, the houses of many 
gables, and the romantic history of the town. And 




ixV-^^— — _M I ^^^^^^^^^""^-^^^^^^^ 




^^^.^pliiiii 













The Custom House, Salem 



SALEM 183: 

Salem has no less than eight Hawthorne houses: the 
house of his birth, the house of his youth, the house of 
Ms courtship, the house in which James T. Fields per- 
suaded him to surrender the manuscript of The Scarlet 
Letter, these and the House of the Seven Gables, the cus- 
tomhouse, and two other houses in which the writer 
lived, account for some twenty-five years of his life. 

The fame of Salem's architecture has traveled almost 
as far as has the story of her witchcraft. Any one 
may walk about her streets and feast his eyes upon her 
doorways and note the exquisite proportions of her old 
mansions. The favored who penetrate to the interiors 
will find stairways with twisted balusters and newels, 
carved mantels and handsome wainscots in their rooms 
of state. There were cunning craftsmen here in the 
early days, and they wrought with conscientious pride 
in their joinery. " The Mclntires " were a family of 
builders whose skill descended from father to sons; 
much of their work survives, and " Mclntire arches " 
are sought out by architects from all parts of the coim- 
try. In quiet side streets will be found many gambrel 
roofs. Walking in early evening through Federal 
Street and Chestnut Street, it is not difficult to dream 
yourself back to the time when courtly men and pow- 
dered women here in the fashionable part of the town 
made their way at candle-lighting to the assemblies 
in Hamilton Hall. 

The oldest building in Salem and one for which all 
visitors inquire is known as the Witch House. But it 



184 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

will disappoint most visitors, for it has no connection 
with the witchcraft craze, save that tradition claims 
that some preliminary examinations of suspected per- 
sons were held therein when it was the residence of 
Judge Jonathan Corwin. While in looks part of the 
building is scowling and sinister enough, a modern drug 
store has been attached to its most prominent comer, 
an impertinence that it is hard to forgive. You find 
it right in the heart of the city at the corner of Essex 
and North Streets. Going through the narrow passage 
to the little area at its rear, hemmed in as it is by mod- 
em buildings, you get a view that conveys a distinct 
impression of age. Originally it had wooden pineapples 
over its window lattices, and three gables in its front. 
The old timbers may be seen at the rear of the store. 
But the record of the alterations which have been made 
upon this building suggests the story of the dealer in 
antiques who offered a battered chair to a lady, re- 
marking that " with new legs, a new back and a new 
seat the piece would make a fine example of the furni- 
ture of the period." The house was altered and re- 
paired in 1675 and again in 1746, when a gambrel roof 
supplanted the ancient gables. It is said that the part 
of the front which has a projecting upper story retains 
the original appearance. For nearly two centuries it 
was in the possession of the Corwin family. 

" The Roger Williams House " some would have it 
called, supposing that famous man to have lived in it 
in 1635. Some have gone so far as to claim for him 



SALEM 185 

a residence therein in 163 1. He had been " teacher " 
of the First Church for a time in that earlier year, 
and again in 1633, becoming minister of the church in 
1635. But the General Court in Boston was distrustful 
of him, and sent a vessel to Salem to carry him tO' 
England. Trusting in a small compass for guidance, 
and depending upon the Indians for aid, he fled from 
this old house into the wilderness, and made his way 
amid the desolation of winter to Rhode Island. 

Jonathan Corwin was one of the judges in the witch- 
craft trials. Salem hanged nineteen witches — fourteen 
women and five men — and pressed Giles Corey to 
death; and Boston hanged two witches. To the court- 
house the curious come in thousands to see portions of 
the testimony of these trials and the original death 
warrant of Bridget Bishop. There also they find the 
" witch pins," the implements which the bewitched 
charged the bewitchers with using upon them. They 
are kept in a corked bottle. You look at them and 
marvel. Crudely made, bent and black, these pins 
were said to be tools of torture. Shall you laugh at the 
absurdity of the sight, or shall you shiver at the enor- 
mity of the suffering which these pins caused? 

The fear of witchcraft came upon the Puritans in 
the hard winter of 1692. A few miles from Salem 
at Danvers Centre, there was a church whose pastor 
was the Rev. Samuel Parris. He had been a merchant 
in the West Indies, and in his household was a slave, 
an Indian woman named Tituba, whom he had brought 



186 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

from the islands, and two children, — a daughter Eliza- 
beth, aged nine, and a niece, Abigail, eleven years old. 
Tituba was something of a sorceress, and into the ears 
of these children she poured many a weird tale. Soon 
these girls began to do unaccountable things. They 
.assumed strange postures. They shrieked incoherently. 
They crept into holes and under tables. Sometimes 
they fell into convulsions. The village physician de- 
<clared them bewitched. Mr. Parris and the neighbor- 
ing ministers had resort to fasting and prayer, without 
ridding the children of the evil influence. These chil- 
dren, and some other girls and women similarly af- 
fected, were not thought of as subjects of a nervous 
disorder or as wilful mischief-makers, but as the victims 
of some malevolent persons. They were besought to 
tell who bewitched them. At last they cried out 
*' Tituba," then " Goody Osbum," a sick woman, and 
" Sarah Good," a vagrant. This was the beginning of 
the accusations which cost twenty lives. These girls 
began half in jest and ended in belief in their own be- 
witchment. 

But then, nearly every one in those days believed in 
witchcraft. And did not the Bible command: " Thou 
shalt not suffer a witch to live? " Had not Matthew 
Hale and Coke, the great English jurists, implied the 
fact of witchcraft in some of their decisions? And then 
Governor Winthrop, Governor Bradstreet and Governor 
Endicott had each sentenced a witch to death, and exe- 
icutions had taken place in Charlestown, Dorchester 



SALEM 187 

and Cambridge, Springfield and Hartford. Cotton 
Mather, the Boston divine, had pubHshed a book in 
which he had indicated his behef in witchcraft. In 
1682 in England there had appeared a work by Joseph 
Glanville containing an account of witches in Sweden, 
a story which was duplicated in many details by what 
happened in Salem, and with this book it is likely that 
Cotton Mather was acquainted. 

In March, 1692, Tituba, Sarah Osbum and Sarah 
Good were examined before Judge Hathome, the novel- 
ist's ancestor, and Jonathan Corwin. Guilt was as- 
sumed by the magistrates and the public. The chil- 
dren declared themselves pinched and beaten, and 
pricked with pins, which they produced whenever the 
accused looked at them. Tituba manifested cunning 
and invention, telling witch stories of the broomstick 
variety, and impUcating others in her " confessions." 
Then persons of eminence in the community and of char- 
acter never before assailed were accused. In a short time 
there were himdreds in the jails of Boston, Cambridge 
and Salem. The epidemic of fear and superstition was 
on. Everybody believed, therefore it was easy to sus- 
pect anybody. Diabolical compacts furnished easy 
solutions of all mysterious occurrences. Giles Corey 
bore the agony of the weights and died three days 
before his wife was hanged. In Dan vers still stands the 
home of Rebecca Nurse, an old woman of high char- 
acter, who also was executed. The Rev. George Bur- 
roughs, upon the ladder of the gallows, calmly declared 



188 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

his innocence and offered the Lord's Prayer. On the 
last execution day eight persons were hanged. The 
order of Governor Phips in May, 1693, releasing from 
jail all under accusation, ended the era of witchcraft in 
America. 

What compensation was possible was made to the 
survivors. One of the " afflicted children " confessed 
her mistake. Judge Samuel Sewall, one of the commis- 
sioners who heard the cases, on Fast Day in the Old 
South Church, Boston, and annually thereafter, bravely 
stood and stated his conviction of error in having been 
led to accept " spectral evidence." 

From the pages of the ancient documents before 
your eyes here in the court-house you get such entries 
as these, which appear in the direct examination of 
Rebecca Nurse: 

Mr. Hathorne — What do you say? (speaking to one 
aflQicted). Have you seen this woman hurt you? 

" Yes, she beat me this morning." 

" Abigail, have you been hurt by this woman? " 

" Yes." 

(Ann Putnam in a grievous fit cried out that she hurt 
her.) 

. " Goody Nurse, here are two. Ann Putnam, the child, and 
Abigail Williams, complain of your hurting them. What do 
you say to it ? " 

N. — I can say before my Eternal Father I am innocent 
and God will clear my innocence. 

The only death warrant which has been preserved, one 
of the most curious documents in America, reads thus i 



SALEM 189 

" To George Corwin, gentleman High Sheriff of the county 
of Essex, Greeting: 

" Whereas Bridgett Bishop, als Oliver, the wife of Edward 
Bishop of Salem in the county of Essex, sawyer, at a speciall 
court of Oyer and Terminer held at Salem the second day of 
this instant month of June for the countyes of Essex, Middlesex 
and Suffolk before William Stoughton Esq. and his associate 
justices of the said court, was indicted and arraigned upon five 
several indictments for using, practicing and exercising on the 
nynteenth day of April last past and divers other days and times 
before and after certain acts of witchcraft in and upon the bodyes 
of Abigail Williams Ann Putnam junr. Mercy Lewis May 
Walcott and EUzabeth Hubbard of Salem Village single women 
whereby their bodyes were hurt afflicted pined consumed wasted 
and tormented contrary to the forme of the statute in that 
case made and provided. To which indictment the said Bridgett 
Bishop pleaded not guilty and for tryal thereof put herself upon 
God and her country whereupon she was found guilty of the 
felonyes and witchcraft whereof she stood indicted and sen- 
tence of death accordingly passed against her as the law directs. 
Execution whereof yet remains to be done. These are there- 
fore in the name of their maj(es)ties William and Mary now 
King and Queen over England &c to will and command you 
that upon Fryday next being the tenth dy of this instant month 
of June between the hours of eight and twelve in the afternoon 
of the same day you safely conduct the sd Bridgett Bishop als 
Oliver from their majties gaol in Salem aforsed to the place of 
execution and there cause her to be hanged by the neck until 
she is dead, and of your doings herein make return to the clerke 
of sd court and pr cept. and hereof you are not to faile at 
your peril and this shall be your sufficient warrant given under 
my hand and seal at Boston the eighth dy of June in the fourth 
year of the reign of our Sovirgne Lord & Lady William and 



190 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

Mary now King and Queen over England &c annogr dom 
1692. 

William Stoughton. 

" According to the within written precept I have taken the 
body of the within named Brigett Bishop out of their majesties' 
gaol in Salem and safely conveighed her to the place provided 
for her execution and caused ye sd Brigett to be hanged by the 
neck until she was dead (and buried in the place) all which was 
according to the time within required and so I make returne 
by me. 

George Corwin, Sheriff." 

Let it be remembered that, contrary to the very gen- 
eral impression, no witches were ever burned in Salem. 
Gallows Hill, where all the executions took place except 
that of Giles Corey, stands bleak and wind-swept to- 
day. Nature does little to ameliorate its bareness. 
Perhaps it is fitting that the hill should remain desolate, 
in sackcloth and ashes, rather than in the green and 
crimson of joyous life. Tourists chatter and laugh on 
its summit in summer, and boys whoop in delight as 
they coast down its sides in winter. Far away, indeed, 
seems the tale of those nineteen executions. But, as 
has been suggested by the secretary of the Essex Insti- 
tute, Hawthorne pointed out a duty which remains 
still undone. As long ago as 1835 he wrote: 

" Yet, ere we left the hill, we could not but regret that there 
is nothing on its barren summit, no relic of old, nor lettered 
stone of later days, to assist the imagination in appealing to the 



SALEM 191 

heart. We build the memorial column on the height which our 
fathers made sacred with their blood, poured out in a holy 
cause. And here, in dark, funereal stone, should rise another 
monument, sadly commemorative of the errors of an early race, 
and not to be cast down, while the human heart has one in- 
firmity that may result in crime." 

"Let all the indictment against Salem be considered 
now, however, and then let it be dismissed. There is 
an additional count, for Salem persecuted the Quakers, 
scourged and branded them, as was done in many other 
places. There was considerable provocation, no doubt, 
for not all the Quakers were mild and peaceful. Some 
of them seemed to find a species of joy in outraging the 
laws. Not thus, nevertheless, can be justified the 
thirty strokes given Ann Coleman, ten in Salem, ten 
in Boston and ten in Dedham. Hawthorne shows her 
" naked from the waist upward, and bound to the tail 
of a cart, dragged through the Main Street at the pace 
of a brisk walk, while the constable follows with a whip 
of knotted cords." Painful, but a little more pleasant, 
is the story told by Whittier of Cassandra Southwick : 

" And slowly at the sheriff 's side, up the long street I passed; 
I heard a murmur round me, and felt, but dared not see, 
How, from every door and window the people gazed on me." 

Different, indeed, is the story of the achievements 
■of Salem at sea. Pace from end to end of Derby Street 
to-day, and it will be both easy and difficult to imagine 
the commercial supremacy which once belonged to this 



192 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

port; easy, because landward an occasional mansion 
indicates the wealth that was piled up by the old-time 
mariners, and difficult, because seaward the bay is 
deserted and the wharves are falling into ruin. The 
records of Salem's commerce are to be found in the 
old log-books in the Essex Institute, in the exhibits in 
the Peabody Museum, in the heirlooms which fill the 
stately homes erected by the nabobs of the golden age, 
and in the suggestive roominess and emptiness of the 
custom-house erected in 1818. 

Can you imagine the Derby Street of a century and 
more ago? What a street it must have been in the first 
decade of the last century, for in those ten years Sa- 
lem's imports brought duties of seven million dollars! 
Wagons crowded the water-front. Sailmakers sat on 
the floors of their lofts and stitched away on great sheets 
of white canvas. The ship-chandlers' shops were full. 
The stores held many curios from far lands, and parrots 
and monkeys were part of the stock in trade of every 
" up-to-date " dealer. Sailors chatted upon the cor- 
ners. When their ships were ready to sail again, they 
went aboard knowing that not a word would be heard 
from them for a year, and that it might be two years 
or even three before they sighted Salem Harbor once 
more. The Salem lad was a cabin-boy in the vessel of 
his father or some other owner at fifteen, he was a cap- 
tain at twenty, and by the time he was forty he had 
sailed all the seven seas and amassed a fortune, so that 
it only remained for him to build a fine house and spend 



SALEM 193 

the balance of his years in opulent retirement. When 
Elias Hasket Derby died in 1799 his fortune was es- 
timated at a million and more, and was said to be the 
largest private fortune accumulated in America in the 
eighteenth century. 

Mount the steps of the custom-house and gaze from 
the Hawthorne window upon Derby Wharf, or walk 
out farther and have a look at old India Wharf. What 
scenes they witnessed in the days of the Indiamen! 
Every day some ship started on a long voyage. Every 
week some vessel left port to fight her way east or west 
around one of the Ultima Thule capes. Good Hope or 
" the Horn." There goes the Light Horse with a cargo 
of sugar for St. Petersburg, the venture which opened 
the way for American trade with Russia. And there 
comes the Grand Turk from Batavia with a cargo of 
teas, silks and nankeens. From this harbor sailed the 
Atlantic, taking the American flag for the first time to 
Bombay and Calcutta. Thence also went in 1801 the 
Margaret and found her way to " Nangasacca," Japan. 
For years the Dutch East India Company had been 
trading in Sumatra and the other rich islands of the 
Orient. But it was an inquisitive Salem skipper who 
found wild pepper there, and he told the secret only to 
the owner of his ship. Then the Rajah squared away 
her yards from Salem harbor — having fitted out as 
secretly as ever in late years has a filibuster taken 
aboard powder and ball in a neutral port — and when 
she came back eighteen months later she had a cargo of 



194 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

pepper which yielded a profit of seven hundred per cent. 
The secret was kept for years, and other lands had to 
look to Salem for their supplies of pepper. " Old Billy 
Gray," as Hawthorne called him, had in 1807 fifteen 
ships, seven barks, thirteen brigs, and one schooner in 
the merchant trade. Failures there were, to be sure. 
Richard Cleveland at twenty-three began voyaging 
with an investment of two thousand dollars. He sailed 
aroimd the earth twice, and at thirty had seventy thou- 
sand dollars, a competence for those days. This he 
invested in the voyages of others, — and they lost it, 
and one hundred thousand dollars more, and in the end 
he had to take a place in a custom-house. 

Do you see them as you stroll about these ancient 
docks? Square-riggers, ships and brigs, manned by 
bold and resourceful men, and waited for by brave and 
patient women. There were pirates in every sea; 
England and France were always at war, and the Brit- 
ish were insisting upon the right to impress alleged de- 
serters from American ships. So these Salem vessels 
were equipped with small arms and sometimes with 
cannon. No wonder the seal of the city shows in the 
backgroimd a ship imder full sail and in the foregroimd 
an East India merchant. 

Scarcely a resident of Salem but had investments, 
small or large, in the voyages of these vessels. These 
risks were called " adventures." As an example, this 
transaction has been cited: The Messenger sailed in 
18 16 with one hundred Spanish dollars entrusted to 



SALEM 195 

her master for investment in coffee and sugar, nutmegs 
and spice. The captain bought coffee in Batavia for 
$83.30 which he sold in Antwerp at $183.75, so that the 
on-shore speculator realized a handsome profit. 

Salem's commercial prosperity began with the close 
of the Revolution and was ended by the Second War 
with England. In a sense the War for Independence 
made the fortune of the city. The war closed the chief 
ports of the colonies and stopped enterprises at sea. 
The ports about Massachusetts Bay turned to priva- 
teering. When peace came the idle ships sought a new 
occupation. They were large vessels and they could 
outsail almost anything they were likely to meet on 
the high seas. So they went to the Pacific and the 
East. The enormous chartered companies of Europe 
found them formidable competitors. The embargo 
which preceded the War of 181 2 and the war itself 
closed that period of enterprise and success, and then 
the railroads came and diverted commerce elsewhere. 

Salem's record in those two wars with England was 
not less splendid. One seaport after another, from 
Boston to Savannah, was closed, leaving to Salem and 
the neighboring small ports the task of keeping open 
communication with Europe. For the Revolution, 
Salem furnished her quota of men for the army, while 
for the struggle on the water she fitted out one hundred 
and fifty-eight privateers, carrying more than two thou- 
sand guns; and these vessels, with a loss of fifty-four 
of their own number, took four hundred and forty-five 



196 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

of the seven hundred prizes captured by all the Colo- 
nies. Next to John Paul Jones might be ranked Salem's 
hero, Jonathan Haraden, who took a thousand guns 
from the British during the war, and fought a British 
frigate in the Bay of Biscay with one hundred thousand 
persons on shore watching what was a veritable David- 
and-GoHath combat. When the Second War with Eng- 
land came, Salem supphed forty of the two himdred 
and fifty armed vessels of the country. 

But enough of the " glory that was Greece and the 
grandeur that was Rome," only that you must have 
these memories in mind to appreciate the water-front 
of Salem. Now you are ready to see the custom-house. 
It seems, when you have read what Hawthorne wrote of 
it in the introductory chapter of The Scarlet Letter, 
to have changed none at all since he was here at work 
marking goods with the stencil which you find in the 
office. Said the romancer: 

" Its front is ornamented with a portico of half a dozen 
wooden pillars, supporting a balcony, beneath which a flight 
of wide granite steps descends towards the street. Over the 
entrance hovers an enormous specimen of the American eagle, 
with outspread wings, a shield before her breast, and, if I rec- 
ollect aright, a bunch of intermingled thunderbolts and barbed 
arrows in each claw. ... On the left hand as you enter the 
front door is a certain room or oflfice, about fifteen feet square, 
and of a lofty height; with two of its arched windows command- 
ing a view of the aforesaid dilapidated wharf, and the third 
looking across a narrow lane, and along a portion of Derby 
street." 



SALEM 197 

The building is really an excellent example of the 
architecture of the late colonial style. As you enter 
the door of the handsome and well-kept room on the 
left the pictured face of Hawthorne looks at you from 
the wall. The deep windows gUsten in their white 
paint, against which shows pleasingly the green of two 
urines which climb upon each side of the deep recess of 
one of them and join their tendrils beneath the arched 
top. Through this window Hawthorne looked out upon 
the wharf. The desk at which he worked is now in the 
Essex Institute. If you care to climb you may go up 
to the lookout, whence you will see Marblehead 
just across the water, and landward the curious in- 
termixture of the old and the new which makes 

Salem. 

So minute and reaUstic is the accoimt of the writer 
in the introduction to his great novel, that there are 
many who yet suppose that he actually found the mate- 
rials for The Scarlet Letter in an imfinished room in the 
building in which he began his service as surveyor in 
1846. This room is said to have been on the second 
floor in the rear of the collector's office. In Hawthorne's 
time it was filled with, barrels and boxes containing old 
papers. Many of the scenes and persons he described 
were real, but no manuscript was foimd in that room, 
and of course no former surveyor came in ghostly form 
to urge its publication. 

Having thus been brought upon the trail of Haw- 
thorne, you may follow it about the city. He was a 



198 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

sailor's son and he came of an ancestry of sailors. The 
house in which he was bom is in Union Street, numbered 
27. It is a gambrel-roofed structure, with other gam- 
brels about it in the narrow street. Built before 1692, 
it looks much as it did when the novelist's grandfather 
bought it in 1772, except for the modem door and win- 
dows. Here Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on Inde- 
pendence Day, 1804, in the northwest chamber of the 
second floor. But you will plead in vain for entrance. 
" We don't let no one in nohow," is the answer returned 
to at least one most humble petitioner. 

Hawthorne's father died at far Surinam in 1808, 
and the family removed to the house, at the rear of the 
birthplace, which now is numbered io3^ and 12 Herbert 
Street. It was then owned by his mother's father. It 
is an ugly house, lately made over into a " three- 
decker " tenement. There is not a line of beauty about 
it. Almost as a blow does it come to you that in this 
house the boy grew and dreamed, and the man mused 
and wrote. " In this house! " — you repeat the phrase 
over and over. And away up there is " the window 
under the eaves." That is the room crowded against 
the roof to which Hawthorne referred when he wrote 
in American Notes: " In this dismal chamber FAME 
was won." And in a pleasant fashion he mentioned 
it in letters dated 1840 and 1843: 

" Here I sit in my old accustomed chamber where I used to 
sit in days gone by. Here I have written many tales. . . . 
Should I have a biographer he ought to make great mention of 




Hazvfhontc's Birthplace. Salem 



SALEM 199 

this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of ray lonely 
youth was wasted here. 

" Here I am in my old chamber, where I produced those 
stupendous works of fiction which have since impressed the 
universe with wonderment and awe! To this chamber, doubt- 
less, in all succeeding ages, pilgrims will come to pay their 
tribute of reverence; they will put off their shoes at the thresh- 
old for fear of desecrating the tattered old carpets! 'There,' 
they will exclaim, ' is the very bed in which he slumbered, and 
where he was visited by those ethereal visions which he after- 
wards fixed forever in glowing words. There is the washstand 
at which this exalted personage cleansed himself from the 
stains of earth and rendered his outward man a fitting exponent 
of the pure soul withiri. There, in its mahogany frame, is the 
dressing-glass which often reflected that noble brow, those 
hyacinthine locks, that mouth bright with smiles or tremulous 
with feeling, that flashing or melting eye, that — in short every 
item of the magnanimous face of this unexampled man. There is 
the pine table, — there the old flag-bottomed chair on which he 
sat, and at which he scribbled, during his agonies of inspiration." 

More closely connected with Hawthorne's life was 
this house than any other in Salem, — the greater is 
the pity of its present use and condition. He lived 
therein from 1808 to 1818, and for a time in 1819-1820. 
After his college days at Bowdoin, he came again for 
a while to Herbert Street, and there were periods of 
residence here in 1838, 1840 and 1846. With his wife 
he was domiciled here for a time at the beginning of 
his service in the custom-house in the last named year. 
He wrote much here, and from this door he issued for 
his long evening walks. 



200 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

The years 1828 to 1832 were spent in the house in 
Dearborn Street now numbered 26, but which once 
stood opposite its present site ; and in Chestnut Street, 
at Number 18, the family Hved about eighteen months. 

The house of Hawthorne's courtship, the home of 
the Peabodys, is at Number 53 Charter Street. It is a 
big, square, three-story building, but little changed 
since it was thus alluded to by the novelist in Dr. 
Grimshawe's Secret: " (it) cornered on a graveyard 
with which the house communicated by a back door. 
... A three-story wooden house, perhaps a century 
old, low-studded, with a square front standing right 
upon the street, and a small enclosed porch containing 
the main entrance, affording a glimpse up and down the 
street through an oval window on each side." 

A pretty story, indeed, is that of Hawthorne's meet- 
ing with and wooing of Sophia Amelia Peabody. It has 
been pronounced an authentic instance of love at first 
sight. Salem hardly knew the writer. There were 
questions and guesses as to the identity of the author 
of the stories which had their scene in Salem. But it 
was Elizabeth Peabody who found the right trail, dis- 
covered the lonely man, and managed to make his 
acquaintance. She says: " Mr. Hawthorne told me 
that his sisters lived so completely out of the world 
that they hardly knew its customs. Whenever after 
this he called at our house he generally saw Sophia. 
One day she showed him her illustration of * The Gentle 
Boy,' saying: ' I want to know if this looks like your 



SALEM 201 

Ilbrahim.' He sat down and looked at it, and then 
looked up and said: ' He will never look otherwise to 
me.' A year later he wrote to me: ' She is a flower to 
be worn in no man's bosom, but was sent from heaven 
to show the possibilities of the human soul.' " He 
married the woman of whom he thus wrote in Boston 
in 1842. 

The old cemetery next door was frequented by Haw- 
thorne, and this will be a convenient time to ramble 
through it. The iron fence supports a tablet, which 
tells you that the enclosure is the oldest of Salem's 
burying grounds and that it contains the grave of 
Governor Bradstreet. Of the ancestor whose grave he 
found here Hawthorne said: " In the old burial-groiuid 
is a slate gravestone, carved around the borders, to 
the memory of ' Col. John Hathome, Esq.,' who died 
in 1717. This was the witch- judge. The stone is sunk 
deep into the earth, and leans forward, and the grass 
grows very long around it ; and on account of the moss 
it was rather difficult to make out the date." A few 
feet away is the grave of Captain Richard More, who 
came when a boy in the Mayflower. The low stone is 
the only contemporaneous gravestone of a Mayflower 
Pilgrim that now remains. 

The manuscript of The Scarlet Letter was delivered to 
James T. Fields in the winter of 1849 " in a chamber 
over the sitting-room " of the house at Number 14 Mall 
Street. It is not far from Washington Square, standing 
sidewise to the street, with a vine climbing about the 



202 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

dentilated and pilastered doorway. The door opens 
upon a yard, shut from the street by a board fence, con- 
taining a swing and seats that intimate that the laughter 
of children now rings through the room where the great 
novel was composed. To this house Hawthorne came 
home one day in July, 1849, and told his wife that he 
had been officially decapitated. The brave woman re- 
plied: ** Oh, then you can write your book." And when 
he asked as to the ways and means of existence mean- 
time, she showed him the small heap of gold that she 
had saved out of the household expense money. The 
novel was written, and he relates how he read the final 
scene to his wife while his " voice swelled and heaved " 
as if " tossed up and down on an ocean as it subsides 
after a storm." 

James T. Fields has told how the story found its way 
to the public : how he pressed Hawthorne to tell what 
he had been writing, how he caught sight of a chest of 
drawers in which it occurred to him there was something 
hidden, and how he vehemently charged Hawthorne 
with the fact. " He seemed surprised, I thought," he 
says, " but shook his head again; and I rose to take 
my leave. ... I was hurrying down the stairs when he 
called after me. . . . Then quickly stepping into the 
entry with a roll of manuscript in his hands, he said: 
' How in Heaven's name did you know this thing was 
there? As you have found me out take what I 
have written, and tell me after you get home and 
have time to read it, if it is good for anything. It 




The House of the Sczrn Gables, Salem 



SALEM 203 

is either very good or very bad, — I don't know 
which.' " 

Thus the man 

... in whose glance " 

(were) " silent worlds of mystery and romance " 

was aknost badgered into the revelation of a novel 
which the world long ago numbered among the few that 
shall endure. That novel brought him fame, and Salem 
is proud of her son. But it seems strange that there 
always was something of a coldness between the town 
and the man. His social attentions were restricted to 
the house beside the cemetery whence he took his wife. 
He was shy, too shy for society. His life had been 
secluded and lonely. Perhaps he was at times rather 
over-emphatic in his aloofness. It surely is time to for- 
get all those things, and very largely Salem has forgotten. 
One more house completes the Hawthorne list. And 
this is " The House of the Seven Gables." The house so- 
called is in Turner Street, close to the bay. The novel- 
ist himself declared in his preface that he had built a 
house " of materials long in use for constructing 
castles in the air." But with this house, then the home 
of his cousin. Miss IngersoU, he was very familiar. 
The story runs that on a time she told him the house 
once had seven gables and showed him the beams and 
mortices to prove the statement, and that he was quite 
infatuated with the sound of the phrase. He called 
his cousin " the Duchess," and to her adopted son, 



204 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

Horace IngersoU, he once wrote a letter telling of his 
going over the house, making out five gables and learn- 
ing where the others had been. This letter, if authen- 
tic, seems to show where the title and germ of the story 
came from, whether the Turner house is the house or 
not. 

At any rate the house is now one of the most inter- 
esting in all Salem. Built about 1662, it has been re- 
claimed from neglect and decay by a public-spirited 
Salem woman, and all the old gables are in place once 
more. Architects and antiquarians have wrought long 
upon it. Walk about it and you will count upon your 
fingers now seven and again eight gables. Covered 
up on the exterior was found a heavy oaken door 
studded with iron nails, and this now makes the main 
entrance. And here is the shop of Hephzibah, — a de- 
lightful arrangement; for the story has the shop, and 
whether the old house had it or not, the visitor will be 
glad to discover it, jangling bell and all. The parlor 
is handsome, with a good mantel and deep windows, 
near one of which Hawthorne loved to sit, and upon the 
wall is a portrait of " the Duchess." In the chimney is a 
concealed staircase. No one knows how it opened in 
the old days, and now it is concealed so perfectly that 
the visitor is puzzled until the spring is touched. That 
featiu*e is enough to set any house up in business, and 
the gabled chambers complete an interior which is most 
attractive, irrespective of its relation to the novelist. 
Through the parlor windows you look out upon an old- 



SALEM 205 

fashioned garden. The Bethel of the Marine Society 
now shuts off the view across the bay. 

In this house Hawthorne heard from Horace Inger- 
soU the story of the Acadian lovers, and he passed it on 
to Longfellow, who wove about it his classic poem 
Evangeline. The rom-ancer's Grandfather' s Chair tales 
are said to have been derived from a remark of his 
cousin about an old arm-chair in the parlor. 

The Old Bakery, after two hundred and fifty years, 
has been removed to a site adjacent to the House of the 
Seven Gables. There it has been restored, and, with 
the garden and its neighboring antiquity, it yields the 
visitor a somewhat complete notion of the conditions 
of early colonial life. The bakery was a little low- 
studded room whose beams clearly were hewn out with 
an axe and roughly ornamented with augur holes. Its 
clapboards were split out from the logs by hand, and 
the space between the outer wall and the inner was 
cemented with brick and mortar. 

The Essex Institute and the Peabody Academy of 
Science are institutions in some ways without rivals 
in this country, and in some respects the collections in 
the Academy are not equaled outside the British Mu- 
seum. The Institute has a large and valuable library, 
which includes over a thousand old Salem log-books, 
in whose pages one finds fascinating tales of adventure 
in war and peace. The antiquities in the museum, 
which is a part of the Institute, show the curious modem 
how the inhabitants of the old town measured time 



206 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

with hour-glass and sun-dial, how they prepared their 
meals with chafing-dish and roasting-jack, how they 
covered their heads with bonnets and wigs, and how 
they defended their homes and persons with flintlocks 
and horse-pistols. With the furniture, the china, the 
tools, the clothing and the weapons of the colonial 
period, there are here large collections of relics and cu- 
rios from distant lands. The Institute has also nearly 
two hundred portraits, some of them silhouettes and 
miniatures, which are valuable historically, and many 
of which have considerable worth as works of art. By 
the union in 1848 of the Essex Historical Society, which 
had been founded in 1821, and the Natural History 
Society, organized in 1833, the Essex Institute came 
into being, with the object of promoting history, science 
and art in Essex County. The institution is well housed 
at 132 Essex Street. It is in this building that you find 
the copy of the scarlet letter law which James M. Barrie 
pronounced the most curious thing he saw in Salem. 

Right at hand at Number loi Essex Street is the 
granite building lettered across the front " East India 
Marine Hall," now the home of the Peabody Academy. 
Enter this " paradise of collections " at your own peril, 
for you are likely to become absorbed and to be lost 
to the world for hours. Who can hope to describe it? 
WiUiam Wetmore Story tried to do so in his Ode on 
the Anniversary of the Fifth Half- Century of the Land- 
ing of John Endicott, the f oimder who came to Salem 
in 1628 with a hundred adventiu"ers and a charter from 



SALEM 207 

the English company which claimed this territory. 
The sculptor-poet wrote of the things he saw as a boy: 

" Strange dresses — bead and feather trimmed — 
High Tartar boots, and tiny Chinese shoes, 

And all the strange craft that ever skimmed 

The shark-infested Indian sea — 

Catamarans, caiques, or birch canoes, 
TinkHng pagodas strung with bells, 
Carved ivory balls, half miracles; 

Strung necklaces of shells and beads, 

Sharp poisoned spears and arrowheads, 
Bows, savage bludgeons, creeses keen. 
Idols of hideous shape and grin, 

Fat, bloated spiders stilted high 

On hairy legs that scared the eye; 
Great, gorgeous spotted butterflies. 

And every splendid plumaged bird, 
That flashes through the tropic skies 

Or in the sultry shade is heard. 
All these, and hundreds more than these, we saw, 
That made our pulses beat with a delighted awe." 

The old captains of Salem actually began this col- 
lection in 1799 with a rhinoceros horn, an elephant's 
tooth and a two-stemmed pipe from Sumatra. The 
visitor sees the white swan-tureens which were used 
at the banquets of the original society, all of whose 
members must have " actually navigated the seas be- 
yond the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn, as masters 
or supercargoes of vessels belonging to Salem." The 
hall was erected in 1824. It is agreeable to note what 



208 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

have been the business occupants of the first floor: 
The Asiatic Bank, The Oriental Insurance Office, and 
the United States Post-Office. A gift of George Pea- 
body, the London philanthropist, who was born only 
a few miles away, provided the funds in 1867 for the 
organization of the Academy, which at once purchased 
and refitted the hall. Since then the building has been 
much enlarged. The collections are arranged on an 
educational plan. There are minerals, woods, birds, 
fishes, mammals of the county ; and there are Australian 
marsupials. East Indian corals, and leopards and goril- 
las from other distant lands. Here is a palanquin bought 
in Calcutta in 1803, and there are many objects col- 
lected by E. J. Glave, who was " in darkest Africa " 
with Stanley. There are war-clubs from the New Heb- 
rides, a colossal Hawaiian god, a devil's temple from 
Fiji, and here is a curious specimen of carving on a most 
minute scale done by a monk of the fourteenth century. 

You renew your impression of Salem's marine great- 
ness here when you come to the collection of models 
and pictures of Salem's ships. Of these there are a 
hundred and fifty, and of portraits of Salem's mariners 
and merchants there are nearly half as many. 

Here, too, as you look at the great collection of things 
Chinese, you are reminded that Salem has a manda- 
rin in her own name and right, General Frederick 
Townsend Ward, who led the Chinese troops against 
the Tai-Ping rebels, imtil they came to be called " the 
ever- victorious army," and whom China rewarded 



SALEM 209 

with the red button and peacock feather of a mandarin 
of the first rank, and honored after his death with a 
temple and pagoda and an imperial decree that he 
should be worshiped as a deity. His portrait and the 
bullet which killed him are in the Essex Institute. In 
Derby Street he was bom, and his romantic career is 
enough to set any Salem boy a-dreaming of a life of ad- 
venture, even if Ward did marry a Chinese wife, and 
in spite of the fact that the world gives to " Chinese 
Gordon a good deal of the glory that belongs to the 

American hero. 

A long roll is that of Salem's famous men. The 
mathematician, Nathaniel Bowditch, who translated 
La Place upon the desk now in the Essex Institute, was 
bom in Brown Street. The Rev. Jones Very, whose 
poems Emerson collected, lived and died in Federal 
Street General F. W. Lander, born in Barton Square, 
showed the country where to put a wagon-road over 
the Rocky Mountains, and when he was killed m the 
Civil War, Salem gave him an historic funeral. Judge 
Joseph Story built the house at 26 Winter Street m 
1811 and there in 1819 was bom the son who became 
a writer and sculptor. Dr. Edward A. Holyoke lived 
and died in Essex Street, and in his honor the Massa- 
chusetts Medical Society gave a centenary dinner. 
Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, clerked m an 
Essex Street store, and the " Rumford Roaster was 
the favorite oven of Salem housekeepers for many years. 
Salem thinks of George Peabody as her own, and Will- 



210 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

iam Hickling Prescott, the historian, is clearly hers, 
for he was born where the Museum building of the 
Essex Institute now stands. 

Very long, too, is the tale of Salem's fine old houses 
and doorways and staircases. Some of the houses are 
old enough to have been built by the eariy settlers, and 
they have something of the dignity and of the barren- 
ness of the Puritan character. Others, built in the late 
colonial and Revolutionary times, show the English 
Georgian style, so adapted that it became the fullest 
flower of the New England colonial architecture. Like 
weeds in an old-fashioned garden are many of the in- 
trusive modem houses here. The modem structures 
tire one often in a year or two; the colonials continue 
to satisfy after a century. 

Walk down Federal Street. At Number 80 is the 
Pierce-Nichols house, three-storied, with tall chimneys 
and balustraded roof, fluted pilasters at the comers, 
and a classic Doric entrance of fine proportions; it has 
a balustraded fence before it, having high urn posts, 
and a great paved courtyard at the rear. At Number 
138 is the " Assembly Hall," now a private residence, 
with its Ionic entrance and fluted pilasters in the front 
facade. Here Washington and Lafayette danced; its 
name comes from the record the former made in his 
diary: " Went to assembly where there was at least a 
hundred handsome and well dressed ladies." In the 
second house beyond lived that General Henry K. 
Oliver, publicist and musician, whose famous tune. 




Doorzi'ay of the Salem Club 



SALEM 211 

" Federal Street," was named after the street in which 
the house stands. Much of the best of Mclntire's work 
was rebuilt into this house when the costly Derby man- 
sion in Derby Square was taken down. 

Chestnut Street is arched with fine elm trees and 
lined with handsome houses. They have a distin- 
guished air, their fronts are covered with vines, and the 
knockers, the fences and the gardens, and the rear 
views as well as the doorways, make them a deHght 
from whatever angle they are studied. These Salem 
gardens must not be missed, by the way. The fences 
and walls which enclose them are usually covered with 
ivy. They were planned by no landscape artists. 
Somebody's grandmother planted them first, and they 
have been continued with patient care. You see them 
all over the city, illustrations of what taste and atten- 
tion will do. 

Salem's fine houses are not grouped in any one sec- 
tion. The Common, renamed Washington Square in 
1802, is surrounded with them. The Salem Club at 
Number 29 has the house long known as the Peabody 
mansion. The house at Number 13, the Andrew man- 
sion, was once called the most expensive of New Eng- 
land residences, and one who sees the interior will find 
much there to admire, including some excellent speci- 
mens of the old-time panoramic wall-paper. There 
are doors to see at Ntunbers 81, 128, 318, 380, and 384 
Essex Street, at Niunber 23 Summer Street, at Number 
27 Herbert Street (dating to 1738), in Brown Street, 



212 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

Court (dated 1750), at Number 20 Turner Street, 
Number 2 Andover Street, Number 14 Pickman Street, 
and so on through a long inventory, and they show- 
many styles and various degrees of elaboration. The 
porte-cochere of the Emmerton home in Essex 
Street is sketched by visiting artists day after day 
through the summer. 

Then there are fine staircases at Number 125 Derby 
Street, Numbers 46 and 393 Essex Street, Number 5 
Monroe Street, and so again the list grows long; often 
these staircases have wellwrought twisted newels and 
balusters. There are beautiful mantels in many houses, 
— at Hamilton Hall, Number 12 Elm Street, Number 
180 Derby Street, Number 94 Boston Street, Number 
14 Pickman Street, and at Numbers 202 and 313 Essex 
Street. This is a dry enough catalogue, true; it is only 
cited to show the right Salem has to her claim of dis- 
tinction for her colonial architecture. 

Hamilton Hall was erected in 1805 and named for 
Alexander Hamilton, becoming the center of the social 
life of the town. Across Chestnut Street from it long 
stood the South Church, with a spire which was as fine 
an example of the Sir Christopher Wren style as the 
country can boast. Built as a child makes pyramids 
are these steeples, cube piled upon cube, cylinder upon 
cylinder, octagon upon octagon, and all surmounted by 
a slender steeple. 

Of Salem's interesting churches there are the stone 
Gothic St. Peter's, built in 1833, beside whose entrance 



SALEM 213 

is the tomb of Jonathan Pue, whom Hawthorne put into 
his introductory chapter to The Scarlet Letter; the First 
Church, now Unitarian, upon the site of a meeting 
house built before 1635; and the Tabernacle Church, 
where the first American foreign missionaries were or- 
dained in 1 81 2. From Salem in the Caravan Adoniram 
Judson and Ann Haseltine and Samuel Newell and his 
bride sailed on their long voyage to the East, The 
diminutive building long shown as the Roger Williams 
meeting-house has been discredited. This " first Puri- 
tan meeting-house," in the rear of the Essex Institute, 
it is now thought may have been the first Quaker 
meeting-house in Salem, built by Thomas Maule in 
1684. 

In the big garden in the rear of the Institute there 
now stands also what has long been called the " Old 
Ward House," which formerly was in St. Peter's Street. 
Built in 1684, it is an example of the home which pre- 
ceded the era of opulence. It has a second-story over- 
hang, a lean-to roof, and diamond-paned casement 
windows, and the rooms are restored and furnished in 
the seventeenth century manner, while at the rear, in 
the one-story part, is the little corner shop room, 
after the fashion of a later day. A weU-sweep and 
bucket have been placed behind the house. In its res- 
toration it is designed to illustrate the conditions of life 
prior to 1700. Beside the house is a flower garden con- 
taining only those flowers cultivated in the Salem gar- 
dens before 1700, and nearby is a shoemaker's shop of 



214 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

1830 fully equipped with old time benches and tools. 
Very like it is the Narbonne house at Number 71 Essex 
Street, built before 1680, and having a decidedly an- 
tique look. It also has the lean-to with the little shop 
on the street side at the rear. 

A house of many gables is the Pickering homestead 
in Broad Street. Although built two hundred and fifty 
years ago, it has always been in the possession of one 
family. It is a family mansion, matching its surround- 
ings exactly, with a curiously shaped chimney, a dainty 
balcony over the front door, a narrow hallway and 
winding stairs within, and it is set among fine trees with 
a fence and hedge to give it seclusion. Its most noted 
occupant was Timothy Pickering, who served under 
Washington in war as a soldier and in peace as a cabinet 
officer. 

And other notable houses still are the mansion-house, 
near the custom-house, now the home for aged women, 
built by Benjamin Crowninshield, secretary of the navy 
under Madison and Monroe, and occupied by President 
Monroe for four days in 181 7; the Pickman house, 
erected in 1749, whose owner ornamented the staircase 
with carved and gilded codfish, a curious proclamation 
of the origin of his wealth; and the Pickman-Brook- 
house place, whose builder left an opening in the win- 
dow blind for a spy-glass through which to watch for 
incoming ships. The ceiling of the cupola has a fresco 
of the Derby fleet, as the great merchant Elias Hasket 
Derby lived there until the time of his removal to his 



SALEM 215 

own mansion, now demolished, a few years before his 
death. Curious, too, is the tradition that when John 
Andrew built his Washington Square house he ballasted 
the tall hollow pillars with rock salt which his ships 
brought from Russia. 

With one of the conspicuous houses of Salem there is 
associated a gruesome tale. The house stands next to 
the Essex Institute. It has a plain fagade, the only 
ornaments of which are a delicate balustrade above the 
cornice, and a handsome semicircular porch before the 
entrance. In a room in this house Captain Joseph 
White was killed in 1830, it was alleged, by his nephews, 
George and Richard Crowninshield, to get possession 
of his will. The trial that followed was a celebrated 
case, Webster having part in it. The jury failed to 
agree. There were thrills enough for a sensational novel 
in the course of the trial; the presiding chief justice 
fell forward dead just after charging the jury; and 
even before trial one of the Crowninshields took his 
own life while in jail. 



THE WHITTIER COUNTRY 

" Among the blessings which I would gratefully own is the 
fact that my lot has been cast in the beautiful valley of the 
Merrimac, within sight of Newbury steeples, Plum Island, and 
Crane Neck and Pipe Stave hills." 

John Greenleaf Whittier. 

The Valley of the Merrimac is the land of Whittier. 
Coming down by boat from Haverhill to the sea, the 
eye lingers upon scene after scene of charming beauty, 
which the poet himself once described in these terms: 

" The scenery of the lower valley of the Merrimac is not bold 
nor remarkably picturesque, but there is a great charm in the 
panorama of its soft green intervales: its white steeples rising 
over thick clusters of elms and maples, its neat villages on the 
slopes of gracefully rounded hills, dark belts of woodland, and 
blossoming or fruited orchards, which would almost justify the 
words of one who formerly sojourned on its banks, that the 
Merrimac is the fairest river this side of Paradise. Thoreau 
has immortalized it in his * Week on the Concord and Merri- 
mack Rivers.' The late Caleb Cushing, who was not by nature 
incUned to sentiment and enthusiasm, used to grow eloquent 
and poetical when he spoke of his native river. Brissot, the 
leader of the Girondists in the French Revolution, and Louis 
PhiUppe, who were familiar with its scenery, remembered it 
with pleasure. Anne Bradstreet, the wife of Governor Brad- 
street, one of the earliest writers of verse in New England, sang 



THE WHITTIEE COUNTRY 217 

of it at her home on its banks at Andover; and the lovely mis- 
tress of Deer Island, who sees on the one hand the rising moon 
lean above the low sea horizon of the east, and on the other the 
sunset reddening the track of the winding river, has made it. 
the theme and scene of her prose and verse." 

The boat speedily leaves the crowded city behind,, 
and soon carries you past the few straggling survivors 
of that famous avenue of sycamores which Hugh Tal- 
lant, the first Irish resident of Haverhill, set out away 
back in the early 3^ears of the eighteenth century. This 
Hugh Tallant was the village fiddler 

" With his eyes brimful of laughter, 
And his mouth as full of song." 

On you go past the bridge where was an old chain 
ferry, and soon you have in view the quaint Rocks 
Bridge connecting West Newbury with Rocks Village. 

" Over the wooded northern ridge, 

Between its houses brown, 
To the dark tunnel of the bridge 

The street comes straggling down. 
You catch a glimpse, through birch and pine, 

Of gable, roof, and porch. 
The tavern with its swinging sign, 

The sharp horn of the church." 

Over on your left, midway in the three-mile strip 
of Massachusetts between the river and the New Hamp- 
shire line, is a cluster of Whittier places. The birth- 
place is there, the house of the Joshua Coffin school. 



218 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

the site of the district school of In School Days, Job's 
Hill, the East Haverhill Church, and the site of Thomas 
Whittier's log house. Nearer at hand is one of the 
garrison houses in which settlers found safety in the 
days of the Indian forays. In a churchyard quite near 
the river is the grave of " the Countess " of Whittier's 
poem, the village bride of Count Fran9ois de Vipart, 
who died within a year of her marriage. On the south 
side of the Merrimac was the home of Sarah Greenleaf , 
and farther down are the well-remembered laurels of 
Newbury. On the north bank again and in Rocks Vil- 
lage is the home in which " the Countess " lived. On 
you go past the site of " Goody " Martin's house to 
Amesbury, where Whittier lived nearly threescore years, 
and where is the cemetery in which he was buried. Now 
comes Deer Island, the home of Harriet Prescott Spof- 
ford, and Newburyport, and the Salisbury Sands, where 
the river finds its home in the sea. 

The Quaker poet and patriot sprang from a typical, 
rock-bound. New England farm, and the secluded farm- 
house, three miles to the east of the City Hall of Haver- 
hill, was his home for twenty-nine years. For the re- 
maining fifty-six years of his life, his home was the 
famous house at Amesbury, a few miles nearer the 
ocean. In this beautiful region of hills and lakes and 
streams, with a few of the splendid oaks and pines 
which once were plentiful still remaining, while now 
there are numbers of prosperous villages and cities 
interrupting the once continuous green, there yet may 



THE WHITTIER COUNTRY 219 

be found many farms that are quite beyond the din 
of the town. 

The pilgrim who has but a day at his disposal will 
make no tour which will bring him greater returns than 
that which a long summer's day will afford on the trail 
of Whittier. If he knows just a little even of the poetry 
of the author of Snow-Bound, and if he has in any degree 
the gift of imagination, he will accept the offer to seat 
himself in the old rocking-chair in front of the big fire- 
place in the fine large kitchen in the Haverhill house, 
and as he hears the caretaker say: " That was Mother 
Whittier's chair, and I suppose she rocked Greenleaf 
in it," forthwith he will have gone on an enchanted 
journey into the past. 

For the kitchen is almost exactly as it was when the 
Quaker boy was scribbling verses in it. The old farm 
has changed but little in the century which has passed 
since Whittier was a schoolboy. You spin along the 
Toad in an automobile or electric car, quite unaware 
of the nearness of the old homestead, until you note 
a granite marker where a road emerges from the trees, 
and you are told the shrine you seek is " just over 
there." It is nearly as secluded to-day as it was when 
Whittier was born there in 1807. Hills shut in the little 
vaUey on one of whose slopes the farmhouse stands, 
facing not the road but the brook which tumbles down 
over the stones, from the hill called " Job's Hill," after 
an Indian chief of the early days. 

There is the square block of the house, with the slant- 



220 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

ing, peaked roof, and the big chimney in the center into 
which five fireplaces open, painted white on the sides 
that may be seen from the road and red upon the other 
two sides, perhaps because white paint was the more 
expensive. There is the one-story extension, form- 
erly used for a wood-shed, and part of it now used 
for a dining-room by the caretakers; and, at the oppo- 
site corner, facing the road, there is the little porch 
which gives access to the kitchen. There are the lilacs 
clustering about the windows, the old well with the 
long sweep, the old-fashioned flower garden, the trees 
— ash, maple, hemlock, walnut and pine — that help 
to produce the quiet seclusion which the tourist is glad 
to find here; and there is the splashing and twisting 
brook with its fern-grown stepping stones. 

The barn across the road is longer than it was in 
the poet's day, but the portion toward the house is just 
as it was when the boys tunneled their way to it through 
the snow-drifts. Do you remember Snow-Bound? 

" Our buskins on our feet we drew; 
With mittened hands, and caps drawn low. 
To guard our necks and ears from snow, 
We cut the solid whiteness through. 
And, where the drift was deepest, made 
A tunnel, walled and overlaid 
With dazzling crystal," 



and so they 



. . . reached the barn with merry din, 
And roused the prisoned brutes within." 



THE WHITTIER COUNTRY 221 

The caretaker tells you she herself has seen drifts 
fifteen feet deep between the house and the barn. 

Surely as you sit in that chair in that kitchen, 
twenty-six feet by sixteen it is, you cannot help taking 
a long journey. Happy the thought that prompted 
you to bring a volume of the poet's verse with you. 
" The oaken log, green, huge and thick," there it lies 
upon the hearth. " The bull's-eye watch that hung in 
view," there it hangs above the fireplace, its hands 
pointing to nine, " the mutely warning sign " that the 
circle must disperse to bed. What room anywhere has 
been given a greater degree of consecration by any 
poem of any poet than this one? The same utensils 
are hung upon the crane; the same table stands be- 
tween the windows; many of the dishes upon the 
shelves are in their old places; the old almanacs hang 
there by the mantel, the oldest dated 1815; and there 
in the corner toward the east is the desk which belonged 
to Whittier's great-grandfather, and upon which the 
boy wrote his first verses; and, what is an impressive 
coincidence, upon this desk he wrote also his very last 
poem. The desk served the poet's reforming zeal as 
well, for he sat before it to write Justice and Expedi- 
ency, the first pamphlet against slavery. 

The house is almost a Whittier museum. The knife 
and fork belonging to " the Countess " are shown you, 
the cider mug and the pewter porringer, the flax wheel 
which the mother used, the dining table which was in 
daily service, and any number of articles, each with its 



222 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

association, and many of them referred to in the poems 
of the man who was bom in the room adjacent to this 
kitchen. 

Up two steps at the western end of the big room is 
the Uttle chamber which was " mother's room." It is 
said that the pioneer who built the house found, when 
he dug his cellar, a huge boulder which it was too much 
labor to remove, and, as he wished to have a milk room 
at this comer, he was obHged to put the floor two steps 
above the rest of the cellar. This inequality extends 
through all the stories of the house. In that little room 
off the kitchen is a four-post bed with homespim sheet 
and patchwork quilt, the work of Whittier's mother. 
The baby clothes of Whittier's father, made by the 
grandmother who brought the name of Greenleaf into 
the family, hang upon the wall. The bureau was there 
in its present position in the old times, and upon it 
stands the Uttle mirror before which the poet lathered 
his face and then scraped the lather away again for 
some sixty or seventy years. 

Pass through the door at the southwestem comer 
of the kitchen and you stand in the room in which on 
December 17, 1807, John Greenleaf Whittier was bom. 
The table which his mother carried from her home 
when she was married in 1804 stands between the 
windows where she placed it. The picture which sug- 
gested the poem, The Sisters, hangs upon the wall. 
The brass andirons, candles and whale-oil lamp shine 
as they did when the tidy New England housekeeper 



THE WHITTIER COUNTRY 223 

brightened them. Open grandmother's Hnen chest and 
you will find some of the linen sheets which were spun 
and woven by the poet's mother before she was mar- 
ried. The L-and-H strap hinges on the door to the 
little front entry are sure to catch the eye. That entry 
seems barely large enough for one person at a time, and 
from it there ascend the narrow stairs, making two 
turns before they reach the next floor. 

Here are some of the books which made the well- 
read library of that isolated farmhouse. This life of 
George Fox, founder of the Quaker sect, must have 
been handled by Whittier. When he was about fifteen 
he made a few rhymes in which these books figured: 

" The Lives of Franklin and of Penn, 
Of Fox and Scott, all worthy men. 
The Lives of Pope, of Young and Prior, 
Of MiltcHi, Addison and Dyer; 
Of Doddridge, Fenelon and Gray, 
Armstrong, Akenside and Gay." 

Then, too, you see the Bible of Whittier's mother, 
opened at her favorite Psalm, the twenty -fifth. In the 
house at Amesbury there is another of her Bibles, in 
which she had picked out that Psalm in her old age with 
pinpricks. There are many portraits on these walls, 
some of them comparatively recent paintings of the 
poet himself, and others very old, including a silhou- 
ette or two that have special historical interest. 

Ten years before his death the poet visited this place 
for the last time, and it saddened his gentle spirit to see 



224 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

many indications of neglect. He wished that he might 
buy the property and restore it. After his death it was 
purchased by a friend and a board of nine trustees put 
in charge of it. It has been restored to the order of the 
olden days almost perfectly, and it remains to-day, as 
the biographer of the poet says, " one of the finest speci- 
mens in the country of the colonial farmhouse of New 
England." 

There are various other Whittier shrines in the 
neighborhood of Haverhill. The academy, for which, 
when nineteen, he wrote a dedication ode, stands, a 
little changed, in Winter Street. Looking down upon 
the Merrimac, a few miles away, and just within walk- 
ing reach of the city, is the Saltonstall mansion, called 
" The Buttonwoods," now occupied by the Haverhill 
Historical Society. In front of this house stand the 
three remaining sycamores which in 1739 were planted 
by Hugh Tallant, the servant of Judge Richard Salton- 
stall, twenty feet around their trunks and eighty feet 
in height. Whittier knew them well and of them he 
sang: 

" In the outskirts of the village, 

On the river's winding shores, 
Stand the Occidental plane-trees, 

Stand the ancient sycamores. 

One long century hath been numbered, 

And another halfrway told, 
Since the rustic Irish gleeman 

Broke for them the virgin mould." 













7/2e 0/rf Spiller Garrison House, Haverhill 



THE WHITTIER COUNTRY 225 

The mansion is now a treasure-house of reHcs. In a 
fireproof room there may be seen the death warrant of 
the first witch hung at Salem, various mementoes of 
Hannah Duston, and various pain tings, swords, utensils, 
and miscellaneous historical articles and documents. 

The little old white house which stands under the 
shadow of the mansion is the first frame structure built 
in the town of Haverhill, reared for the Rev. John 
Ward, the first minister of the parish, who occupied it 
from 1 64 1 to 1693. The Hon. Nathaniel Saltonstall 
married the minister's daughter, Elizabeth, and by their 
descendants the mansion was presented to the society. 
The ancient frame house itself contains many pieces 
of colonial furniture, including a seraphim, a sort of 
miniature piano of the " square " style, which dates 
back into the preceding centuries. 

Just beyond " Buttonwoods " is a " garrison house " 
so called, built in peaceful times by settlers who came 
up the Merrimac in boats long before the present road 
on the river bank was laid out. The assigned date is 
1724, and the first occupant was a Joseph Whittier, 
whose descendants of the same name held the house 
until about seventy years ago, when two daughters, 
the heirs of the homestead, married respectively Jack- 
son B. Swett and Joseph Spiller. By the latter name 
the house is now known, being commonly called " the 
Spiller garrison house." But, while it is doubtful if it 
ever was used for a garrison, the house commands a 
fine view of the river, and must have afforded a strategic 



226 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

outlook against the approach of hostile Indians. The 
building looks its age. The original oak window-seats 
and frames are still in place in the brick walls. The 
brick came from England and the style of the house is 
that of the English village whence the Whittier family 
emigrated. The great fireplace in the west room is the 
largest in the city. 

On the road leading from the Whittier birthplace to 
Rocks Village is an old garrison house of great interest 
because it was the home of Mary Peaslee, the great- 
grandmother of the poet. It is a fascinating place, with 
deep window-seats, closets and attics, port-holes, and 
a deep and dark cellar in one of whose compartments 
the early occupants might barricade themselves upon 
occasion. The house has walls sixteen inches thick of 
white oak and bricks fastened with iron bolts. It was 
built by Joseph Peaslee some time previous to 1675. 
Mary Peaslee probably was bom in this house. The 
yoimgest son of Thomas Whittier, Joseph, married the 
Quakeress in 1694, ^.nd thus Quakerism was brought 
into the Whittier family. It is said that in the large 
rooms of this house the quarterly conventions of the 
Quakers were held, as they were not allowed to worship 
in the meeting-house in Haverhill. 

The name of Harriet Livermore, the " not unf eared, 
half -welcome guest " of Snow-Bound, is also connected 
to a degree with this house. A one-time owner of the 
" garrison," Moses Elliott by name, was for a while the 
accepted lover of the eccentric, beautiful and brilliant 



THE WHITTIER COUNTRY 227 

teacher and preacher of whom the poet drew a vivid 
portrait. The story is that " while attending a New 
Hampshire academy she became deeply fascinated with 
this very promising and scholarly young man from 
East Haverhill." Family prejudices interposed ob- 
jections to the marriage, however. The young man 
became an army surgeon and died of yellow fever at 
Pensacola in 1822. Harriet Livermore lived for a 
time in Rocks Village and thus the Whittiers came to 
know her. 

The allusion to the times of Indian warfare from 
which for seventy years Haverhill was never wholly free 
recalls the suggestion of Whittier's biographer that it 
is possible that Hannah Duston on her return from cap- 
tivity may have brought her ten Indian scalps into 
the kitchen of the Whittier home. Certainly no more 
remarkable incident is recorded of all the Indian strug- 
gles of the American colonists than is the story of the 
courage of this woman for whom a monument has been 
reared in the city of Haverhill. 

Whittier put Rocks Village into a verbal photograph 
in his poem The Countess. This poem was written in 
1863 and dedicated to the " wise old doctor " of Snow- 
Bound. This was Dr. Elias Weld, who had been a 
friend to the Quaker boy, but of whom the poet had 
known very little for many years, until he wrote this 
dedication. The doctor died not long after the poem 
appeared, but the lines gratified him greatly and eased 
the last months of his life. The grave of " the count- 



228 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

ess " in the village cemetery is visited by hundreds 
every year, much as the multitudes go to see the grave 
of Charlotte Temple in New York City, because the 
sentiment of her story appeals to most persons who 
have had a touch of romance in their lives, or who have 
dreamed of the romance that never came. 

But the two stories are quite different. ** An exile 
from the Gascon land " had refuge in the tiny New 
England hamlet, and loving Mary Ingalls, " of all the 
village band its fairest and its best," " for her his rank 
aside he laid." They married, but 

" The burial hymn and bridal song 
Were both in one short year ! " 

In July, 1836, the Whittiers came to Amesbury, nine 
miles from the birthplace of the poet, and to a cottage 
which had four rooms on the lower floor and a room in 
the attic, for which, with about an acre of land, twelve 
hundred dollars was paid. From 1836 to 1840 the 
writer was away from home much of the time, engaged 
in anti-slavery work and as an editor in Philadelphia. 
After 1840 the Amesbury residence became perma- 
nent. The English philanthropist, Joseph Sturge, with 
whom he toured the country, in a delicate way aided 
the poor American reformer financially, and through 
his assistance Whittier was able to add a two-story ell to 
the original building. Subsequently other enlargements 
were made, and the fruit of these was what has always 
been called " the garden room," because it opened upon 



THE WHITTIER COUNTRY 229 

and indeed was biiilt out into the original garden. In 
this room Snow-Bound was written, and The Eternal 
Goodness, and many others of the poems which were the 
best products of his ripest powers. 

That garden room is a shrine in which almost any 
one might dream dreams and fashion fancies, although 
they might not level up to the Whittier standard. The 
room stands just as the poet left it. The floor is cov- 
ered by the carpet he chose. Over the stove is a picture 
of Marcus Antoninus, and upon the opposite wall hangs 
a portrait of Henry Ward Beecher. The present occu- 
pant of the house has placed upon the wall the follow- 
ing quotation from a paper written in this room by the 
poet in 1870: " My room is quiet enough. The sweet 
face of the pagan philosopher looks down upon me on 
the one hand, and on the other the bold, generous and 
human countenance of the Christian man of action; 
and I sit between them as a sort of compromise." 

This " present occupant " is the biographer of the 
poet, Samuel T. Pickard, and happy is the pilgrim who 
has him for a companion while he sojourns in this 
house. You sit in the big, comfortable chair, the fa- 
vorite chair of the poet, and look out on the garden and 
listen to the biographer as he chats in a reminiscent 
way — for he was the companion of the poet many 
times — about the articles in the room and about facts 
in the life of Whittier which are not generally known. 

Mr. Pickard will indicate the portrait of General 
^' Chinese " Gordon on the wall, and relate the story 



230 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

of the letter eight pages long, which John Bright wrote 
to the American poet in criticism of his admiration for 
the hero of Khartoum, and of the letter which Whittier 
wrote in reply. He will speak of the intense interest the 
poet always had in books of travel, and will call atten- 
tion to the Httle shelf upon which there stand several 
volumes right where Whittier placed them a short time 
before his death. Inspection shows that among the six 
or seven books there are a set of Stanley's In Darkest 
Africa, and also a work of that other African trav- 
eler, Du Chaillu. Again, Mr. Pickard will tell the 
story of the poet's last visit to the home of his boyhood, 
a trip which the biographer made with him, and how 
on that fine October day the octogenarian wished to 
have a fire made in the room in which he was bom. 

In gilt frames stand two miniature portraits which 
will command the attention of all who know something 
of the details of the life of the poet. One is a picture 
of Whittier as he was at twenty-two and the other is a 
likeness of Evelina Bray as she was at seventeen. She 
was a classmate of Whittier's at the academy in 1827, 
when he was nineteen, but, while there was an attach- 
ment between them, she did not belong to the Quaker 
society, and there were various other objections to any 
closer ties. A few years after they parted at the close 
of the term he walked from Salem to Marblehead to 
see her. They sat on the rocks by the old fort and 
looked out upon the harbor. Three stanzas of A Sea 
Dream refer to this incident: 



THE WHITTIER COUNTRY 231 

" The waves are glad in breeze and sun; 
The rocks are fringed with foam ; 
I walk once more a haunted shore, 
A stranger, yet at home, — 
A land of dreams I roam. 

" Is this the wind, the soft sea-wind 
That stirred thy locks of brown? 
Are these the rocks whose mosses knew 
The trail of thy hght gown, 
Where boy and girl sat down? 

" I see the gray fort's broken wall. 
The boats that rock below; 
And, out at sea, the passing sails 
We saw so long ago 
Rose-red in morning's glow." 

They met no more for fifty years, except that the 
post once sat beside her, all unconscious of her identity, 
in a pew in a Philadelphia church. And then in 1885 
they met at the reunion of his schoolmates. Evelina 
Bray engaged in educational work with Catherine 
Beecher, and became the wife of an Englishman named 
Downey, and at the age of eighty at the school reunion 
she was seen by the author of America, the Rev. S. F. 
Smith, who thus described her: " She looked, O so 
distingue, in black silk, with a white muslin veil reach- 
ing over the silver head and down below the shoulders. 
Just as if she were a Romish Madonna, who had stepped 
out from an old church painting to hold an hoiu-'s com- 
mimion with the earth." 



232 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

Then Mr. Pickard will hand you a knife which Thack- 
eray owned, and which he gave to James T. Fields, 
who in turn gave it to Whittier, from whom the biog- 
rapher had it. He will show you articles of Whittier's 
wearing apparel and talk entertainingly about each 
piece ; and he will hand you the cane which was made 
from the oak in a house burned by a mob in Philadel- 
phia. The painting which inspired the poem The Rock 
in El Ghor, hangs in this garden room. The various 
portraits selected by Whittier are here, pictures of 
Garrison, Thomas Starr King, Emerson, Longfellow, 
Sturge, Matthew Franklin Whittier. The bookcase 
contains several scores of volumes whose titles one 
might delight to scan. 

But there are other interesting apartments in this 
house. The parlor contains many memorials, most 
precious of them all the portrait of " mother " which 
hangs over the mantel. Opposite is the likeness of 
Elizabeth, the sister of whom the poet sang in Snow- 
Bound, a crayon portrait presented to Whittier by Lucy 
Larcom, who had it made after the poet lost her in 
1864. The desk upon which Snow-Bound and The Tent 
on the Beach were written is here. It contains presen- 
tation copies of many books, with autographs which 
would set a collector wild with delight. One of these 
is so precious and contains so many interesting letters 
and sentiments, each with the signature of a world 
celebrity, that it must not be taken into profane hands. 
You look at it with longing eyes while one of the elect 



THE WHITTIER COUNTRY 233 

turns a few of the pages for you. There is here, too, the 
album containing a remarkable collection of autographs 
of famous Americans which was presented to Whittier 
on his eightieth birthday. Every member of the 
United States Senate and House of Representatives 
has his signature here, as well as other statesmen and 
a large number of literary men. It is a notable fact that 
not a Southern Congressman or Senator failed to write 
his name in this volume intended to honor an anti- 
slavery leader. 

Not all the treasures this house contains can be enu- 
merated. The eagle feathers sent from Lake Superior 
which brought a poem from the ready pen, the files of 
the New England Review and the Pennsylvania Free- 
man, which Whittier edited, scores of other memorials, 
each of which has connected with it a pleasant tale, 
are included in the collections upon which you have 
time but for a passing glance. 

For by this time the afternoon is waning fast. You 
may make a hasty visit to the old weather-beaten en- 
closure around what is known as " The Captain's Well," 
made famous by a poem which relates how the bold 
Captain Valentine Bagley vowed to dig a wayside well 
for the refreshment of all wayfarers, should he be de- 
livered from the miseries of shipwreck and thirst ; to the 
Macy-Colby house, built in 1654, ^-^d sold to Anthony 
Colby by the builder, Thomas Macy, when he fled to 
Nantucket because of the persecutions he had to en- 
dvu-e for harboring Quakers; and to the old cemetery 



234 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

where is the Whittier lot enclosed in a breast-high hedge 
with its series of graves, all marked with the simplest 
headstones, the poet's a little larger than the others. 
On the reverse of that stone are cut these words : 

" Here Whittier lies." 

These are the last words of the final verse of the trib- 
ute written by OUver Wendell Holmes when the poet 
died : 

*' Lift from its quarried ledge a flawless stone; 

Smooth the green turf and bid the tablet rise, 
And on its snow-white surface carve alone 
These words, — he needs no more, — here Whittier lies." 

The Friends' meeting-house attended by Whittier, 
and built in 1851 from plans which he made, is very 
near the old home. A silver plate marks the seat usu- 
ally occupied by the poet. Mrs. Annie Fields has left 
this record of a chat with him about his Quaker 
faith : 

" We strolled forth into the village street as far as the 
Friends' meeting-house and sat down upon the steps while 
Whittier told us something of his neighbors. He himself had 
planted the trees about the church. He spoke very earnestly 
about the worship of the Friends. He loved the old custom 
of sitting in silence, and hoped they would not stray into habits 
of much speaking." 

In the period of silent worship on the last day of 
January, 1865, while bells and cannon proclaimed the 



THE WHITTIER COUNTRY 235 

final act in the abolition of slavery, Whittier, sitting in 
this house of prayer, thought out his Laus Deo. 

" It is done! 

Clang of bell and roar of gun 
Send the tidings up and down. 

How the belfries rock and reel! 

How the great guns, peal on peal, 
Fling the joy from town to town! 

" Ring, bells! 

Every stroke exulting tells 
Of the burial hour of crime. 

Loud and long, that all may hear, 

Ring for every listening ear 
Of Eternity and Time! " 

Other Whittier places there are in this region, many 
of them. Some are at Newburyport. Salisbury Beach 
was described in The Tent on the Beach. Not far away is 
the scene of the wreck at Rivermouth, and the house 
where he died is at Hampton Falls. In Danvers is Oak 
Knoll, where Whittier spent some months each year of 
the last fifteen years of his life, and in that house are 
a considerable number of interesting souvenirs of the 
poet. 

But it is the quiet and pretty village of Amesbury 
which claims and did claim him as her own. A poem 
written by a neighbor of the poet and published in a 
paper of the village, with the title. Ours, is quoted 
by Whittier's biographer in the hand-book of North 



236 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

Essex which he called Whittier-Land; the stanzas there 
given express fittingly the affection and reverence in 
which the people of the town held their most famous 
resident. 

" I say it softly to myself, 

I whisper to the swaying flowers, 
When he goes by, ring all your bells 
Of perfume, ring, for he is ours. 

" Ours is the resolute, firm step. 

Ours the dark lightning of the eye, 
The rare, sweet smile, and all the joy 
Of ownership, when he goes by. 



" I know above our simple spheres 

His fame has flown, his genius towers; 
These are for glory and the world, 
But he himself is only ours." 



NEWBURYPORT- 

" Its windows flashing to the sky, 
Beneath a thousand roofs of brown, 
Far down the vale, my friend and I 
Beheld the old and quiet town; 
The ghostly sails that out at sea 
Flapped their white wings of mystery; 
The beaches glimmering in the sun, 
And the low wooded capes that run 
Into the sea-mist north and. south; 
The sand-bluffs at the river's mouth; 
The swinging chain-bridge, and, afar. 
The foam-line of the harbor-bar." 

— John Greenleaf Whittier. 

In one of the early chapters of Elsie Venner, OHver 
Wendell Holmes wrote somewhat at length of the three 
old towns, Newburyport, Portsmouth and Portland, 
which remain in the list of old-home places to which 
these chapters are devoted. Among other things the 
Autocrat went on in his delightful fashion to say: 

" There are three towns lying in a line with each other, 
as you go ' down east,' each of them with a Port in its name, 
and each of them having a peculiar interest, which gives it in- 
dividuality, in addition to the Oriental character they have 
in common. . . . The Oriental character consists in their large, 
square, palatial mansions, with sunny gardens around them. 



238 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

. . . Each of them is of that intermediate size between a village 
and a city which any place has outgrown when the presence 
of a well-dressed stranger walking up and down the main street 
ceases to be a matter of public curiosity and private speculation. 
. . . They both [Newburyport and Portsmouth] have grand 
old recollections to fall back upon, — times when they looked 
forward to commercial greatness, and when the portly gentle- 
men in cocked hats, who built their now decaying wharves and 
sent out their ships all over the world, dreamed that their fast- 
growing port was to be the Tyre or the Carthage of the rich 
British colony. ... It is not with any thought of pity or de- 
preciation that we speak of them as in a certain sense decayed 
towns; they did not fulfil their early promise of expansion, but 
they remain incomparably the most interesting places of their 
size in any of the three northernmost New England states." 

Newburyport and " Ould " Newbury were originally 
one town. When you have spent a day or a week stroll- 
ing about this first of the Port towns of the Autocrat, 
you come away with pictures in your memory of a place 
mellow with age, with fine trees and pretty gardens 
hidden behind lattices and walls, with big square 
houses that stand for the best architectural taste of a 
century and a century and a half ago, and with many 
houses too old to have much architectural significance, 
but so well preserved that they illustrate vividly the 
life of the primitive times of the pioneers. You bring 
away also a fancy full of the scenes which old High 
Street must have witnessed, of dinners and dances 
when beaux and belles wore fabrics from Lyons and 
Paris, and drank syllabub and hot pimch, of the bride 



NEWBURYPORT 239 

whose coach was drawn by six white horses and at- 
tended by coachmen and footmen and four outriders, 
and of that young merchant prince, Nathaniel Tracy, 
who could travel from Newburyport to Philadelphia 
-and sleep each night in his own house, although it was 
a week's journey. In the days of its greatness the town 
liad as students in one law office Rufus King, Robert 
Treat Paine and John Quincy Adams. William Lloyd 
Garrison here began his career and here he discovered 
Whittier. In the Old South Church was organized the 
first volunteer company for service in the Continental 
Army; there Whitefield preached, next door he died, 
and beneath the church he was buried. Associated 
with the town are stories of commercial prestige when 
great merchantmen found here their port; stories of 
ocean war when wily privateers fought any single 
ship, whatever her size, and eluded the squadrons that 
sought their capture; tragic stories of frozen oarsmen 
and of wrecks on Plum Island; and comedy tales of 
" Lord " Timothy Dexter, who announced himself 
" the first in the East, the first in the West, and the 
greatest Philosopher in the known World." 

Great catastrophes followed hard upon great pros- 
perity. The " embargo " and the fire dealt heavy 
blows to a city which had been ranked in Massachu- 
setts only by Salem and Boston. Newburyport had 
reason to disapprove the Embargo Act. Her ships 
rotted at her wharves. Tar barrels were inverted over 
their topmasts to protect the rigging. The sailors ex- 



240 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

pressively called these barrels " Madison's night-caps."' 
On the anniversary of the Act they paraded the streets 
with muffled drums, while bells tolled and flags himg at 
half-mast, and " Mr. Madison's war " was denounced. 
One old citizen is cited as saying he " wished hell could 
be boiled down to a half-pint and Madison had to 
drink it! " More than most towns has Newburyport 
suffered from incendiaries and conflagrations. Scores 
of times she has had to fight bad fires, but her great 
disaster came in 1811, when in a single night sixteen 
acres and more in the heart of the city were cleared and 
many of the most valuable buildings in the town were 
destroyed. It was such a conflagration for that day as 
was the Boston fire at a later time. Newburyport was 
impoverished between sunset and sunrise. Families 
were completely beggared. The high wind stretched 
the flames in sheets from street to street, and made the 
spectacle one that held a terrible supremacy until the 
days of the fires that devastated cities of the first mag- 
nitude. 

High Street is the chief glory of the town, reaching 
six miles in line with the river, partly in the Port and 
partly in " Ould " Newbury, with splendid elms inter- 
weaving their boughs above it, and many a quaint old 
house and many a stately mansion facing down upon 
it. Cross streets mn from it to the water, and in many 
of these there are historic places. Upon the hills at the 
lower end of the street the sentry once walked his 
rounds on the lookout against a sudden foray from the 



NEWBURYPORT 241 

Indians who lurked in the forests. From the height at 
the upper end Gloucester and Portland may be seen; 
across the river are the oaks on the estate of the Rev. 
J. C. Fletcher of Brazilian fame, 

" The Hawkswood oaks, the storm-torn plumes 
Of old pine-forest kings," 

and where the river's tidal current is divided by the 
cliffs of Deer Island 

"... set like an eagle's nest 
Among Deer Island's immemorial pines, 
Crowning the crag on which the sunset breaks 
Its last red arrow ..." 

is the home of Harriet Prescott Spofford. 

The avenue may be kept in reserve until you have 
seen the other parts of the town. Going first to the 
business center, there swings the sign which bears the 
portrait of General James Wolfe, freshly painted, to be 
sure, but old enough to have a history. Captain Will- 
iam Davenport with his Newburyport company was 
on the Plains of Abraham when the great soldier was 
killed. In 1762 he converted his dwelling house into a 
tavern and hung from a lofty pole a swinging sign, upon 
which was painted a quaint likeness of General Wolfe. 
The " Portsmouth Flying Stage Coach," drawn by 
six horses and carrying six passengers inside, used to 
stop once a week beneath this sign. It had a narrow 



242 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

escape in the Revolutionary War, for public opinion 
denounced it as smacking of royalty, and the Essex 
Journal declared it was " an insult to the inhabitants 
of this truly republican town." It was at least partly 
destroyed in the fire of 1811, and when a new tavern 
was opened a new sign was painted, and, except for a 
short time, it has swung in front of the Wolfe Tavern 
for nearly a century. 

Across the way is the old home of Tristram Dalton, 
built in 1746, now the quarters of the Dalton Club. 
A handsome club house it makes, with good portraits of 
Revolutionary worthies upon the walls, and a hall, 
staircase and parlor that are excellent examples of the 
construction of the period of its building. There are 
portraits of Tristram Dalton here also, and from the 
cards attached you learn that he was bom in 1738 and 
lived to be seventy-nine, that he was a member of the 
Legislature, Speaker of the House, a delegate to the 
Constitutional Convention and a Senator in the first 
Congress of the United States. It was his bride who 
had the six-horse coach, and his return from the Capital 
was annoimced grandiloquently as the home-coming 
of " the Honorable Tristram Dalton, lady and suite." 
This distinguished citizen, in whom democracy had 
not altogether destroyed a liking for old-country titles 
and display, had also a farm on Pipe Stave Hill. There 
Samuel Breck visited him in 1787, and of the visit he 
said : " I do not recollect any establishment in our coun- 
try that contained generally so many objects fitted to 



NEWBURYPORT 243 

promote rational happiness. From the piazza or front 
part of his country house the farms were so numerous 
and the villages so thickly planted that eighteen 
steeples were in view." Some of these " objects fitted 
to promote rational happiness " were listed probably 
in an inventory of his household effects, which showed 
at one time seven horses, three carriages, five hundred 
and sixty ounces of plate, and, in his cellar, twelve hun- 
dred gallons of wine. 

Near at hand is the Public Library, occupying the 
house which was built in 1771 by Patrick Tracy as a 
wedding present for his son, Nathaniel. Of necessity, 
it has been much enlarged, but the rooms in which 
Washington and Lafayette held their receptions have 
been preserved in their original state, and fine rooms 
they are, paneled in hard wood, with arched window 
niches, the ornamental work all done, of course, by 
hard hand labor. 

The Tracy family played some important roles in 
the drama of Newburyport history. Patrick Tracy 
came over from Ireland in the early part of the eigh- 
teenth century and became a prosperous merchant. 
For his son John he bought in 1778 for ten thousand 
pounds the house in High Street which Judge John 
Lowell, grandfather of James Russell Lowell, had built 
for himself. In that house in 1782 John Tracy enter- 
tained several French visitors of distinction, among 
them Marquis de Chastellux and Marquis de Vau- 
dreuil, whose squadron was then at Boston. It was 



244 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

the former who wrote the celebrated Travels in North 
America, in which appears this passage, which well sug- 
gests the manners of the time and something of the 
fortune of the Tracys: 

" Mr. John Tracy came with two handsome carriages and 
conducted me and my Aide-de-Camp to his country-house. , . . 
I went by moonlight to see the garden, which is composed of 
different terraces. . . . The house is very handsome and every- 
thing breathes that air of magnificence accompanied with sim- 
pUcity, which is only to be found amongst merchants. At ten 
o'clock an excellent supper was served, we drank good wine, 
Miss Lee sang and prevailed on Messieurs de Vaudreuil and 
Baron de Taleyrand to sing also; towards midnight the ladies 
withdrew. Mr. Tracy, according to the custom of the country, 
offered us pipes, which were accepted by M. de Taleyrand and 
M. de Montesquieu." 

The " Miss Lee" who sang, was the reigning belle 
of the time, Mary Lee, the daughter of Jeremiah Lee, 
builder of the great house at Marblehead, and who 
became the wife of Nathaniel Tracy. As his wife she 
wore laces and brocades and dispensed an elaborate 
hospitality. Her husband studied both at Harvard 
and at Yale, and went into business in 1772 with Jona- 
than Jackson, who married Hannah Tracy and built 
the mansion on High Street which became generally 
known as the home of " Lord " Dexter. Nathaniel 
Tracy owned and fitted out the first privateer of the 
United Colonies, and before peace came in 1783 he had 
become the principal owner of more than a score of 



NEWBURYPORT 245 

cruisers, carrying more than three hiindred guns and 
navigated and fought by nearly three thousand men. 
The ships of the commercial magnate of Newbury- 
port captured one hundred and twenty vessels, which 
sold with their cargoes for four million dollars. Of that 
sum Mr. Tracy gave more than a million and a half for 
public uses, besides donating a large sum out of his 
private fortune. In that same period he also was the 
owner of one hundred and ten merchant vessels, which, 
with their cargoes, were valued at three million 
dollars. 

But there is a reverse to this shield. When the war 
ended but one of the twenty-four cniisers was left, 
and of the merchant fleet only thirteen ships remained. 
No wonder that at the close of the war this man, whose 
career is not matched in the early history of Massachu- 
setts, foimd his fortune gone. In 1786 he was bank- 
rupt. He owned in the times of his prosperity, besides 
the State Street mansion in Newburyport, such houses 
elsewhere as the Vassall-Craigie-Longfellow house in 
Cambridge. At the age of only forty-five he died in 
the Spencer-Pierce " old stone " house in Newbury. 

Newburyport abimdantly proved her patriotism dur- 
ing the Revolution. Privateers swarmed out of the har- 
bor and many a prize they captured. Upon the other 
hand, twenty-two vessels carrying a thousand men 
left this port never again to be heard from, and every 
man of the crews of two privateers had to spend several 
years in the Old Mill Prison at Plymouth. Boston 



246 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

emptied a cargo of tea into her harbor; Newbiiryport 
confiscated another cargo and burned it publicly in 
Market Square. In Stamp Act times no single stamp 
was paid for or used in this high-spirited town. The 
expedition of Colonel Benedict Arnold against Quebec 
was recruited here, and Aaron Burr sailed with them 
when they embarked for the Kennebec. The little 
Newburyport sloop Wasp had a sting as fierce as her 
namesake's, for in three months she captured thirteen 
merchantmen, and when she finally went down imder 
the united fire of four ships of the fine, every man was 
at his post and the colors were flying. In the churches 
prayers used to be offered as these ships put to sea, 
and the daughter of James Parton has written brightly 
of the " characteristic blending of audacity, anxiety 
and piety in the note sent up to the pulpit by the cap- 
tain of a little twenty -five-ton sloop, the Game Cock, 
carrying four swivels and a handful of men, requesting 
the congregation to pray for his success in * scouring 
the coast of our unnatural enemies ! ' " 

Among those Old Mill prisoners were the three Lunt 
brothers, Henry, Cutting and Daniel. Henry Limt 
was a lieutenant with John Paul Jones in all his cruises 
in the Bon Homme Richard, the Alliance and the Ariel. 
Cutting Lunt also was a lieutenant with the man who 
fought the Serapis. There was a fourth brother, Ezra 
Lunt, who was a captain in the army. 

One of the easiest captures of the war was effected 
by the clever stratagem of Captain Offin Boardman. 



NEWBURYPORT 247 

A British transport from London was seen tacking 
about in the bay in the fog, evidently supposing herself 
to be in the harbor of Boston. The captain went off 
in a whaleboat and offered to pilot the ship in. Once 
aboard with his seventeen companions he ordered the 
flag struck, an order which, under the circumstances, 
could not be resisted, and, amid vociferous cheers, 
the ship Friends delivered her wine, coal, vinegar and 
live hogs to the patriots at Newburyport rather than 
to the Tories and British at Boston. 

Of Newburyport churches there are three of archi- 
tectural significance and historical distinction, St. 
Paul's Episcopal, the Unitarian First Parish, and the 
Old South Presbyterian. The old Episcopal frame 
church looks venerable enough, with its curious porch, 
its square tower surmoimted by a belfry, and its grave- 
yard. Again and again the name " Coffin " appears 
upon the stones in this parish burying place, and a wife 
is always a " relict " in these epitaphs. Just within 
the walls enclosing the cemetery is the Tyng monument 
with an iron railing about it. Adjacent to the old 
church is a modem, ivy-covered stone chapel. In the 
early days in this strictly Puritanic community, the de- 
fection of the people who went to the chapel which Queen 
Anne endowed seemed lamentable indeed. But in the 
war time its minister, the Rev. Edward Bass, later the 
first bishop of Massachusetts, addressed a letter, still 
in existence, to his wardens and vestrymen, which read 
thus : 



248 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

"July i6, 1776. 
" Gentlemen : As it is your opinion that it is necessary to 
the existence of the church in this place that all prayers in our 
liturgy relative to the King and royal family and British gov- 
ernment be omitted, and therefore request me to omit those 
prayers in my future ministrations, I think it incumbent on me, 
for so important an end, to comply with this request during the 
present state of political affairs ; and remain, with great esteem 
and affection, 

" Yours to serve in every reasonable request, 

" Edward Bass." 

This half-way position was not very satisfactory to 
anybody. Mr. Bass would not pray for the patriots and 
he could not pray for the king. His supporters in Eng- 
land withdrew the assistance formeriy given him. But 
he was an eminent divine in his day and his tomb in 
the churchyard attracts many visitors. 

Queen Anne's Chapel, which came before the present 
St. Paul's, had a bell, presented by the Bishop of Lon- 
don, which, after the destruction of the chapel, came to 
a curious end. On a night in 1839 it disappeared. 

'' 'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the 

house 
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. 
Excepting three persons, with their coach with one wheel, 
Intending of course the right bell to steal. 
Who, with footsteps quite noiseless, crept up Pillsbury's Lane, 
Accomplished their purpose, and crept back again; 
And from that day to this the compiler beUeves 
The bell has been missing, and so have the thieves." 



NEWBURYPORT 24^ 

In Pleasant Street is the meeting-house of the First 
Religious Society, commonly called the Unitarian 
Church. It was built in 1801 and has a pilastered fronts 
and a fine tower of the Wren type — a larger and then 
a smaller square, then a larger and a smaller octagon; 
above the topmost of these sections there rises a slender 
spire upon the top of which is mounted a gilt cockerel. 
The interior has been but little changed in the course 
of a century and more. The pulpit is reached by two 
narrow flights of stairs. Whenever the minister sits 
down, he is lost to the sight of his congregation. The 
society dates back to 1725. One of its ministers, a 
Rev. Mr. Fox, introduced the Sunday-school picnic, 
an innocuous diversion surely. But Newbiuyport was 
startled and amused, and called these parties " Fox's 
Caravans." In 1847 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 
then a young radical of twenty-four, became minister 
of this parish. With characteristic impetuosity he 
pitched into a lot of " causes," and soon was identified 
with the temperance movement, the peace movement, 
the woman's rights movement, the social reform move- 
ment and the anti-slavery movement. He was not 
exactly popular, as is easy to understand, for of promi- 
nent Newburyporters there was Caleb Cushing at the 
front in the war with Mexico, and " the Francis Todd, 
who had caused Garrison's imprisonment in Baltimore," 
was in the town, and the prejudices of the older people 
all ran against the young pastor. But after giving up 
his parish, he remained two years longer in Newbury- 



250 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

port, writing for the newspapers, teaching private 
classes, serving on the school committee, and organizing 
public evening schools, then a great novelty. He says 
in his Cheerful Yesterdays: " On the whole, perhaps, I 
was as acceptable a citizen of the town as could be 
reasonably expected of one who had preached himself 
out of his pulpit." 

Most historic of the churches is the Old South in 
Federal Street, in an old and quaint part of the town 
where are many square hip-roofed houses and others 
of the gambrel type. Here prayers were offered for 
the ships that went to sea, hymns were lined out by 
the deacons, and annual offerings were taken for the 
Algerian captives. Here also Whitefield preached, and 
the first volunteer company of the Revolution was 
raised, and Ezra, one of the redoubtable Lunt brother- 
hood, was the very first to step out into the aisle for 
service in the Continental Army. 

The church well fills the eye. It has a good spire and 
a plain and neat exterior. Much of its history is told by 
the tablets without and within: founded by George 
Whitefield, organized as a Presbyterian Church in 1746, 
erected as the second meeting-house of the congrega- 
tion in 1756, and repaired and improved in 1829, 1856 
and 1905, its bell cast by Paul Revere and Son in 1802. 
From its door went forth the Presbytery of the East- 
ward in 1789 to greet President Washington, and here 
in 18 1 5 was ordained Samuel J. Mills, the missionary 
pioneer, whose name is associated with the haystack 




Pulpit of the Old South Church, Newbury port 



NEWBURYPORT 251 

prayer meeting at Williams College. At one side of 
the pulpit appear the names of the fourteen pastors, 
and upon the pulpit itself is the notice of the interment 
in the vault below of George Whitefield, Jonathan Par- 
sons, the first pastor, and another minister. In the 
front comer of the auditorium is a cenotaph " erected 
with affectionate veneration " to the memory of George 
Whitefield, who in a ministry of thirty-four years 
crossed the ocean thirteen times and preached more 
than eighteen thousand sermons. It was of him that 
Buckle said if oratory is to be judged by its effects, 
he was the most eloquent man since the apostles. 

Thirty years to a day from the time he had first 
preached in Newburyport, this remarkable man died, 
September 30, 1770, at the home of the Rev. Jonathan 
Parsons, two doors from the church. He had said he 
would fain die preaching, and he almost realized his 
desire. Arriving in town, quite exhausted, on Satur- 
day, the people thronged about the parsonage, and, 
when about to mount the stairs to his chamber, he 
yielded to their demands, took his stand upon the steps, 
held his candle above his head, and, although ill and 
weak, spoke on to them until the candle burned down 
and went out in the socket. The next morning he was 
dead. On Tuesday following the ftmeral was held in 
the church. In London John Wesley preached a funeral 
sermon for him in the presence of thousands. Carefully 
preserved in the Old South Church is his Bible with 
the last text, II Corinthians v. 13, marked. It is said 



252 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

the book falls open at the places where he used to bang 
his fist as he waxed warm in his appeals. In the parish 
house, adjacent to the church, are many portraits and 
memorials of the great evangelist. One of the most 
curious of these is this letter: 

"Decbr 8th 1766 

" near 7 at night. 
" Dear Madm 

" I have just now heard that you are married, therefore take 
the first opportunity of wishing your whole self much joy — 
that you both may live together as heirs of the grace of hfe on 
earth, and after both be translated to sit down at the marriage 
feast of the supper of the Lamb in heaven, is the hearty prayer 
of, Dear Madm, 

" Your real Friend and Tr 

" For Christ's sake, 

" G. Whitefield." 

In The Preacher, one of the most noted of Whittier's 
poems, this imtiring itinerant has a worthy memorial: 

" Under the church of Federal Street, 
Under the tread of its Sabbath feet, 
Walled about by its basement stones, 
Lie the marvellous preacher's bones. 
No saintly honors to them are shown. 
No sign nor miracle have they known; 
But he who passes the ancient church 
Stops in the shade of its belfry-porch, 
And ponders the wonderful life of him 
Who lies at rest in that charnel dim. 



NEWBURYPORT 253 

Long shall the traveller strain his eye 
From the railroad car, as it plunges by, 
And the vanishing town behind him search 
For the slender spire of the Whitefield Church; 
And feel for one moment the ghosts of trade. 
And fashion, and folly, and pleasure laid. 
By the thought of that life of pure intent, 
That voice of warning, yet eloquent 
Of one on the errands of mercy sent." 

Other things there are to see in this church. The 
straight-backed pews have been here since 1802. The 
pulpit is high, with mahogany-railed stairs at each 
side. The communion seat, an ancient haircloth sofa 
of mahogany, was sought not long ago by a lady who 
offered a sum in four figures for it. The O openings 
under the deacons' seats were designed to hold their 
beaver hats and keep them conveniently out of harm's 
way. The old sea-captains were the mainstays of the 
congregation years ago, and their black servants had 
benches at the rear of the galleries. The church has a 
very perfect whispering gallery, which most visitors 
find pleasure in testing. If you desire, the accommo- 
dating sexton, whose fund of racy anecdotes never 
seems to run low, will take his lantern and light you to 
the vault where the body of Whitefield was interred. 
Upon a time the bones of the right arm were stolen 
from the coffin and taken to England. Years after they 
were restored, with proofs of their genuineness, a queer 
incident surely, and one from which moralists get texts 



254 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

for sermons on conscience and its terrors. Perhaps this 
incident gave rise to some of the superstitions which 
cause the timid to avoid the church late at night. 

This church had two Revolutionary preachers of 
distinction, the Rev. Jonathan Parsons, who made 
the appeal that thrilled Ezra Lunt and his men, and 
the Rev. John Murray, an Irish orator and patriot, 
on whose head the British set a reward of 600 guineas, 
dead or alive. His stirring exhortations put new fire 
into the hearts of a discouraged regiment which was 
about to disband, and not a man left the ranks after 
hearing his appeals. The Rev. Horace C. Hovey, for 
fifteen years a pastor here, is of the opinion that no 
finer specimen of pulpit eloquence is extant than Mur- 
ray's thanksgiving sermon of December 11, 1783, called 
** Jerubaal, or Tyranny's Grove Destroyed and the 
Altar of Liberty Finished." 

One more incident to make the tale of this church 
complete. When Arnold's men were about to sail for 
the Kennebec, they marched hither on a Sunday 
with drums beating and colors flying, and their chap- 
lain preached from this pulpit, with muskets stacked 
in the side aisles and citizens packing the gallery and 
stairs. This chaplain, the Rev. Samuel Spring, en- 
rolled his name that day beside that of the pastor 
whose thrilling appeal secured the enlistment of the 
volunteer company for the Continental forces. He 
so impressed his hearers by his sermon and his person- 
ality that the North Church called him to its pulpit, 



NEWBURYPORT 255 

and there he served forty-two years. He was the father 
of the famous Gardiner Spring of the Brick Church, 
New York City. 

Next to the parish house of the church is the birth- 
place of William Lloyd Garrison, and beyond it, with 
a vacant lot intervening, is the parsonage in which 
Whitefield died, now a two-family tenement and not 
in good condition. The great abolitionist was bom 
in this plain dwelling in 1805, and his early life was 
passed in this town. He went to the grammar school 
on the Mall for a time, and earned his board by working 
for Deacon Bartlett. He led the boys of the South 
End against the " North Enders." He swam across 
the river to the Great Rock. He became a member of 
the Baptist Church choir. A chance came to him 
to set type in the office of the Herald. Then he began 
to write. The next step was a paper of his own, the 
Free Press. And then he went to Boston, and entered 
upon his great career. The Free Press motto was 
" Our Country, Our Whole Country, and Nothing 
but Our Country." When he founded the Liberator, 
five years later, he put at the top of his page this motto : 
"" Our Country is the World — Our Countrymen are 
Mankind." In the Free Press appeared his first words 
on slavery. He celebrated the sixtieth anniversary 
of his apprenticeship by coming " home " in 1878 
and setting type once more in the office of the Herald. 
In that office to-day are seen his old press and copies of 
his paper. Whittier said that Newbury " must be re- 



256 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

garded as the Alpha and Omega of anti-slavery 
agitation, beginning with its abolition deacon [Ben- 
jamin Colman] and ending with Garrison." 

Garrison rendered the country and the world a 
great service when he discovered Whittier. The light 
could not have been hid under a bushel, but would have 
flamed upon the world at some time, true ; but the lad 
to whom the brook at the farmhouse sang a message 
as it rippled over the stones was happy in finding 
such a friend as Garrison. There came to the print- 
ing office one day a poem, The Exile's Departure, signed 
** W." The sister had sent it without the knowledge 
of the Quaker boy, and the lad was astounded when 
he saw his verses in type. Another poem found its 
way to the office of the Free Press. Then the editor 
went out to East Haverhill to find his contributor. 
When the caller arrived the boy was wriggling on hands 
and knees under the bam after a hen, and Mary Whit- 
tier came with the announcement of visitors from the 
city! But Garrison knew good metal when he saw it, 
and Whittier's career as a poet had begun. 

In the thick of the slavery fight, church doors closed 
against Garrison in his native town as elsewhere, but 
when in 1865 the amendment abolishing slavery was 
passed. Garrison received an ovation in the City Hall 
from his enthusiastic townsmen. For that occasion 
Whittier wrote his Emancipation Hymn. 

" From Joppa Flats to Grasshopper Plains " used 
to be the vemaciilar equivalent to an old resident 



NEWBURYPORT 257 

of Newbury for the Biblical " from Dan to Beersheba." 
The lower waterside region called Joppa is not far 
from the Old South Church. It is a place of dingy- 
houses and clam sheds right at the verge of the tide, 
where away back in 1640 sturgeon were pickled for the 
European market. Most visitors like to see " Jopper," 
taking the chance of encountering a fishlike and ancient 
smell which is not entirely agreeable even to the most 
loyal citizens of the town. 

Through quiet and pretty streets you make your 
way from the waterside to the Mall. About midway 
of the half of High Street which lies in the Port 
is a park encircling a pond, and that pond is said to 
have been created overnight by an earthquake when 
the town was very yoimg. " In a dimple near the centre 
lies a pretty pond," is the pretty way Harriet Prescott 
Spofford puts it, "a peaceful and innocent sheet of water, 
yet bom of such prodigious parentage and no other," 
" Indubitable history," she calls it, how on a day in 
1638 — when the settlers had their houses built, their 
fields cleared, and their colony closely guarded from 
the Indian — there suddenly sprang out of the ground 
a danger against which their precautions could be of no 
avail. One shock succeeded another ; there were per- 
haps' two hundred in all ; walls fell and crevices opened 
in the earth; but no one was seriously injured, and in 
time the people came to refer to " the earthquake " 
much as they might refer to any natural periodical 
occurrence, as a new moon or a flood tide. This pond 



258 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

in the Mall was once high land, which dropped to 
its present level between two days. Alas! that geolo- 
gists of these severely scientific times should come 
forward with their theories of the retreating ice- sheet, 
and the stranding of great icebergs left behind by the 
glacier and rocking to and fro, thus creating this and 
other remarkable hollows in this neighborhood. 

Green terraces surround the pond, and about the 
upper level are wide walks upon which the elms lov- 
ingly cast their shade. On the side of the old court- 
house is a slab marked " Bartlett Mall, 1800." To 
terrace and turf this park, the male population of the 
town turned out almost to a man with shovel and spade, 
and the women served them with coffee and food. 
The old brick building of the Marine Society is here, 
and an interesting mass of picturesque history the title 
recalls. The court-house faces down Green Street, 
and at the foot of that well-shaded thoroughfare 
there is a glimpse of blue water. Back of the park 
are the two old burying hills. 

Here you are in the lofty part of the town. This 
elm-arched avenue, which winds in graceful curves 
along the upper slopes of the hill on which the city 
is built, is literally a High Street. Whichever way 
you turn from the Mall, you will find it beautiful. 
The house in which lived the eccentric Timothy Dexter 
is now the property of Mrs. Katherine Tingley, of 
Point Loma on the Pacific coast. A large mansion 
with a Corinthian portico and an octagonal cupola 



NEWBURYPORT 25& 

surmoiinted by a gilded eagle, — in spite of its deserted 
air, it is attractive to-day. But in the days of the 
Dexter occupancy it must have been sought by multi- 
tudes, no doubt to the great satisfaction of its vain- 
glorious owner. The cupola and the eagle are as they 
were in the days of the early owners of the mansion, 
but the interior has been modernized. A balustraded 
fence now fends the lawn and shrubbery from the curi- 
ous. " Lord " Dexter laid out the grounds in what he 
supposed was European style and planted them with 
flowers and fruits in odd intermixture. In the Provi- 
dence Phoenix, more than a century ago, there appeared 
some rhymes which hit off the looks of the place after 
the singular owner had completed his improve- 
ments : 

" Lord Dexter is a man of fame, 
Most celebrated is his name; 
More precious far than gold that's pure, 
Lord Dexter live forevermore. 

" His noble house it shines more bright 
Than Lebanon's most pleasant height; 
Never was one who stepped therein 
Who wanted to come out again. 

" His house is fill'd with sweet perfumes, 
Rich furniture doth fill his rooms; 
Inside and out it is adorn'd, 
And on the top an eagle's formed. 



260 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

" The images around him stand, 
For they were made by his command; 
Looking to see Lord Dexter come, 
With fixed eyes they see him home. 

" Four lions stand to guard the door, 
With their mouths open to devour 
All enemies who do disturb 
Lord Dexter or his shady grove." 

Strange things indeed were done at the command 
of " Lord " Timothy. Minarets topped with gilt 
balls were placed upon the roof of this mansion. In 
a line across the lawn he reared wooden columns, 
two score of them, each fifteen feet high, and on the 
top of every one was placed a wooden statue, the work 
of a young ship carver. Open-mouthed lions flanked 
the main doorway. The most conspicuous adornment 
of all was an arch bearing statues designated as Wash- 
ington, Adams, and Jefferson. The other figures had 
interchangeable names. One might be Bonaparte 
to-day and Nelson to-morrow. Prominent among 
them was an effigy of the owner, with his own words 
as an inscription: " I am the First in the East, the 
First in the West, and the greatest Philosopher of 
the known World." 

What a wagging of tongues there must have been. 
That story surely traveled from Maine to South Caro- 
lina. " Lord " Dexter had no intention of hiding his 
candle vmder a bushel. He sent whimsical paragraphs 



NEWBURYPORT 261 

to the papers. Fabulous tales intended for the reading 
of the people who wondered " where Dexter got his 
money," were printed at his own expense in his Pickle 
Jor the Knowing Ones, and distributed freely to all. 
There he told of sending forty-two thousand warming- 
pans to the West Indies, which the natives eagerly 
purchased for dipping and straining syrup. And when 
complaint was made that he used no punctuation in 
his book, he added in a second edition a solid page 
of marks, that the " knowing ones " " might pepper 
and salt it as they pleased." 

If you would sample the wares, here is a taste of 
the "pickle:" 

" Ime the first Lord in the younited States of A mercary 
Now of Newburyport it is the voise of the peopel & I cant 
Help it & so Let it goue Now as I must be Lord there will foler 
many more Lords prittey soune for it Dont hurt A Cat Nor the 
Mouse Nor the son Nor the water Nor the Eare then goue on 
all in Easey Now bons broaken all is well all in Love Now I 
be gin with Grat Remembrence of my father Jorge Washington 
the grate he row. ..." 

Turn back now. Make your way between the elms 
of the Mall again, past the J. Q. A. Ward statue of 
Washington, and out High Street toward Newbury. 
Old mansions look down upon you from their terraces 
at the summit of the hill below whose crest runs the 
avenue. Some have gambrel roofs, some are square 
with three stories and hip roofs, and many have the 
roofs surrounded by balustrades or have balustrades 



262 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

enclosing the flat decks from which their roofs 
slant. 

Just at the town line you come to two ancient houses, 
the Toppan and the Ilsley. The one was built in 1697 
by Dr. Peter Toppan. The other, as a tablet states, 
was built by Stephen Swett as early as 1670. It has 
been much altered, but has the look of serene if rather 
unkempt age, and grape-vines in part cover up the 
deficiencies of its appearance. Lately it has been ac- 
quired by the Society for the Preservation of New 
England Antiquities. It will be studied carefully 
and faithfully restored. 

Not far removed is the CoflSn house, a dark building, 
set back from the street, and heavily draped with 
vines, built about 1653 by Tristram Coffin. One of 
the elms here was planted on a day in 1792, when 
Joshua Coffin, whom Whittier celebrated in his poem 
of The Schoolmaster, was bom. Here the teacher and 
historian lived and wrote and here he died in 1864. 
He was a genial writer, too, and this sample of his 
humor has been often cited : Not liking the annexation 
by the Port of a considerable part of Newbury, he 
made, as town clerk, a notice to the effect that " the 
annual town meeting of what is left of Newbury stands 
adjourned to Monday, May 12, 2 p. M., at the Town- 
house, now in Newbury port. '' 

Passing a very old burying ground, some of whose 
epitaphs have been recently recut so that the wayfarer 
without much cost of time may read some inscriptions 



NEWBURYPORT 26a 

in which he will find much delectation, you come upon 
a tablet set in an upright stone, which relates how 
Daniel Morgan's Riflemen were encamped here in: 
1775 before their embarkation for the Kennebec, 
and how, before Quebec, Montgomery fell. 

And now you have reached the lane into which you 
turn to survey one of the most remarkable houses in 
New England, remarkable because it was built in the 
form of a cross, because it was built of stone, and be- 
cause of its history and picturesque appearance. Often 
called "the garrison house," it probably was built for 
a residence, and visitors frequently liken it to an old 
EngHsh manor house. Nowhere else will its type of 
architecture be foimd in New England. The settled 
air of old age which all note who look upon it is vastly 
becoming. There is nothing decrepit or decadent about 
it, however. A roomy, deep-walled, vine-grown house, 
which might easily be made a fortress, but which is 
a home, mellow with age, and wearing that air of do- 
mesticity which only generations of occupants can give, 
with trees grouped about it in fraternal association, 
and looking out upon the water and the mouth of the 
Merrimac — that is the Spencer-Pierce house. 

The porch instantly attracts attention. It has arched 
doorways and windows, and over the door a narrow 
niche, all made of beveled bricks. These and the 
square tiles of the floor probably came from England. 
Age has given the exterior of this porch a beautiful 
coloring. All the ornamentation is of the most fitting 



264 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

design. The door divides horizontally through the 
middle and at one time, it may be, the upper half could 
be defended by a shutter which hung from the ceiling. 
Hand-wrought hinges two feet long carry this massive 
door. The inner door was fastened with a bar, whose 
sockets are still in place. 

The walls of the house, three feet thick in the main 
part and from eighteen to twenty-four inches elsewhere, 
are made of granite and various other stones, with oc- 
casional sections of brick. Overlying the stone, except 
in the arm of the cross which makes the porch, is a 
coating of plaster. The western end of the building 
was originally one story high, but a wooden addition 
more than a century ago carried it up to the height of 
the rest of the structure, two full stories, with an addi- 
tional story framed in by the slanting sides of the roof. 
This garret story held at one time part of the town's 
powder supply. An explosion once occurred which 
blew out the side of the house and landed thenegress 
whose carelessness caused the accident on her bed in an 
apple-tree. The eastern end of the building has been 
lengthened by a wooden addition. Thus the orig- 
inal Greek cross has been altered into a Roman 
cross. 

The depth of the window openings indicate the thick- 
ness of the walls, and the small-paned windows are 
protected by paneled shutters of solid wood, which 
divide horizontally into equal halves. The handsome 
parlor is some twenty feet square, and this and others 



NEWBURYPORT 265 

of the spacious rooms, furnished appropriately, give 
the interior an air of distinction. 

Many are the owners who have occupied this fas- 
cinating building. Presumably it was built by John 
Spencer, the younger, some time in the 1640's. About 
1 65 1 he sold it to Daniel Pierce, the village blacksmith, 
giving possession by the old ceremony of turf and twig. 
In turn came Daniel Pierce the Second, Daniel Pierce 
the Third, Benjamin Pierce and Charles Pierce. Of 
this line was bom Franklin Pierce, the President. 
About 1770 the estate was purchased by Nathaniel 
Tracy, the great merchant and privateersman, whose 
story has been related heretofore. Upon his death in 
1796 the house came into the hands of Captain Offin 
Boardman, the same whose clever expedient made a 
prize of the transport whose officers took Newburyport 
harbor for the harbor of Boston. He added the western 
extension for his invalid wife, who thought it unwise 
to live between stone walls. About 1813 John Pettingill 
purchased the house, leaving it upon his death to his 
daughters, and in 1861 Edward H. Little bought it, 
and in that family it still remains. It seems strange 
that so many dates and events pertaining to so unusual 
a mansion should be conjectural. 

Probably the oldest house in Newbury, in what is 
now Parker Street, is the Noyes house, built about 
1646. The heavy oak frame came from England. Its 
glory is its chinmey, a mighty square of brick, measur- 
ing twelve feet to a side. When workmen reduced its 



266 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

size somewhat, they found a secret closet which could 
be reached only from the cellar. The Rev. James 
Noyes, bom in England, was the builder, and generation 
after generation of the Noyes family have occupied it. 
Unexpected unevennesses greet the explorer everywhere 
within the venerable structure. 

From another old house James Russell Lowell cut 
away the panel which his clergyman grandfather had 
placed over the fireplace. A clerical party were painted 
upon the panel, in convivial enjoyment, despite their 
full canonicals, with the motto, " In essentiaUbus 
unitas, in non-essentialibus libertas, in omnibus chari- 
tas." 

Other tales there are to tell of Newburyport and 
*' Ould " Newbury; tales of Caleb Cushing, first mayor 
of the city, attorney-general of the United States and 
commissioner to China ; of General A. W. Greely, who 
sighted first the Merrimac coast upon his return from 
his long series of privations in the Arctic, — ■ a glimpse 
of home indeed; of Ben: Perley Poore and his resi- 
dence at Indian Hill. Anecdotes and incidents in great 
number have been collected by the loving antiquarians 
who have explored the sources of the history of the 
town. There is the suggestive and pathetic record of a 
January Sabbath in 1686: " So cold that ye sacra- 
mental bread is frozen pretty hard and rattles sadly 
into ye plates." There is the inimitable verdict of the 
jury of twelve women who held an inquest upon the 
body of Elizabeth Hunt, which declared that death 



NEWBURYPORT 267 

" was not by any violens or wrong dun to her by any 
parson or thing but by som sodden stoping of her 
breath." In 1649 Thomas Scott paid a fine of ten 
shillings rather than learn the catechism, and, what 
was stranger far, the town accepted the fine and re- 
mitted the task. The Aquila Chase and his wife who 
were admonished for picking peas on the Sabbath were 
ancestors of Salmon P. Chase, chief-justice of the 
United States. And as late as 1750 or thereabouts, 
Richard Bartlett refused communion with a church 
whose pastor wore a wig, declaring that all wig-wearers 
were in danger of damnation. 

And these incidents make pertinent the answer re- 
turned by Judge Samuel Sewall to those of the old 
country who declared it impossible to subsist in New- 
bury: 

" As long as Plum Island shall faithfully keep the com- 
manded Post; Notwithstanding the hectoring words and hard 
Blows of the proud and boisterous Ocean; As long as any Salmon 
or Sturgeon shall swim in the streams of Merrimack; or any 
Perch or Pickeril in Crane Pond. ... As long as any Cattle 
shall be fed with the Grass growing in the Meadows, which do 
humbly bow themselves before Turkie Hill; As long as any Sheep 
shall walk upon Old-Town Hills, and shall from thence look down 
upon the River Parker, and the fruitful Marshes lying beneath. 
... As long as Nature shall not grow Old and dote; but shall 
constantly remember to give the rows of Indian Com their 
education, by Pairs; so long shall Christians be born there; and 
being first made meet, shall from thence be Translated to be 
made Partakers of the Inheritance of the Saints in Light. Now 



268 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

seeing the Inhabitants of Newbury, and of New England, upon 
the due Observance of their Tenure, may expect that their Rich 
and gracious LORD will continue and confirm them in the 
Possession of these invaluable Privileges: Let us have grace, 
whereby we may serve God acceptably with Reverence and 
godly Fear. For our God is a consuming Fire." 



PORTSMOUTH 

The points of interest in and about Portsmouth are in- 
numerable. . . . Yet many [persons] have crossed the Atlantic 
and suffered the hardships and fatigue of foreign land travel^ 
in order to visit locahties that cannot possibly possess for an 
American one-half the interest of this Old Town by the Sea." 

— Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 

Time enough for many changes to take place has 
elapsed since Thomas Bailey Aldrich, writing of the 
town which he loved and in which he was bom, had 
occasion to refer to the decadence of her commerce. 
" Few ships come to Ri vermouth now," he said. 
" Commerce drifted into other ports. The phantom 
fleet sailed off one day, and never came back again. 
The crazy warehouses are empty; and barnacles and 
eel-grass cling to the piles of the crumbling wharves, 
where the sunshine lies lovingly, bringing out the faint, 
spicy odor that haunts the place, — the ghost of the 
dead West India trade." 

No city has had a more affectionate admirer than 
Portsmouth had in the author of The Story of a Bad 
Boy. But conditions are not altogether as they were 
in 1869. Still there are cnmibling wharves and somno- 
lent streets and a general flavor of antiquity in this 



270 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

** old town by the sea." There are also a reviving com- 
merce, modern business buildings, and the clamor and 
clang of the electric and gasolene trappings of the up-to- 
date city. The ancient and the recent are both on dis- 
play in Portsmouth, and the ancient is by far the more 
attractive to the visitor. The old and the new are 
cheek by jowl, and the old is superior in impressive- 
ness of beauty and dignity. Many of the modem 
buildings look almost cheap and tawdry beside these 
colonial mansions. They were built to last, these old 
ones, and some of the very oldest promise to outlive the 
newest of the moderns. Seemingly only an earthquake 
or a bombardment with twelve-inch rifles could de- 
molish them. 

Strolling about in Portsmouth, you are led to wonder 
if any New England town has more gambrel roofs than 
you see here, and you reflect that a gambrel usually 
means an age of a century at least. Then there are 
scores of good houses whose architecture indicates that 
they antedate considerably the period in which the 
gambrels predominated. There is one long street, 
with a double row of elms interlacing their branches 
above it and bordered with new and expensive homes, 
but these houses appear quite like an anachronism in 
the quaint old city. In some sections of the town the 
honking of an automobile seems intrusive and incon- 
gruous. The aroma of antiquity pervades the place 
as^ completely as does the salt tang of the sea air that 
the east winds bring. 



PORTSMOUTH 271 

Perhaps from the belfry of St. John's Church, or 
from the roof of the Athenaeum, or from some other 
vantage point, you may survey the city and the region 
in which it lies. Brooding over it from your height it 
more than ever satisfies the passion for antiquity. It 
is easy to see rich merchants in knee breeches, with 
silver buckles on their shoes and ruffles at their wrists, 
looking down from Market Street upon gangs of steve- 
dores bent double under the heavy loads of merchan- 
dise which they are carrying from ship to warehouse. 
That " Portsmouth Flying Stage-Coach " of which 
you heard at Newburyport rumbles through Queen 
Street, and the panting horses are pulled up before the 
Earl of Halifax Tavern. There it was that Mistress 
Stavers stood and stu-veyed pretty Martha Hilton, 

"... a little girl, 
Barefooted, ragged, with neglected hair, 
Eyes full of laughter, neck and shoulders bare, 
A thin slip of a girl, like a new moon, 
Sure to be rounded into beauty soon, 
A creature men would worship and adore, 
Though now, in mean habiliments, she bore 
A pail of water, dripping, through the street. 
And bathing, as she went, her naked feet." 

And two miles away at Little Harbor is the great 
house, looking like " a succession of afterthoughts," in 
which that same barefooted girl reigned as mistress and 
grand lady. Her story shall be told a little farther on. 

The first Portsmouth was built of wood, and exten- 



272 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

sive conflagrations have destroyed much of it. The 
oldest house now in the city was built in 1664. But 
there are a great number of fine old mansions ranging 
in age back through all the decades of the eighteenth 
century. The streets grow wider from the water-front 
up town, and the houses come in groups, yet they are 
never packed and huddled together as in larger cities. 
The mansions were fenced and hedged always, and the 
grounds were private. Each had its garden, planned 
with the utmost care, and protected from the curious 
scrutiny of the wayfarer, just as the dining-room and 
the parlor were guarded from uninvited inspection. 
These old gardens are now one of the treasures of 
Portsmouth, as are the fine trees. The care of these 
trees Mr. Aldrich called a " hereditary trait." 

On the crest of a hill overlooking the river stands St. 
John's, from whose belfry you gaze. Just there is the 
Market Square, the center of the business region, 
where the colonial State House once stood, and the 
town pump, which served for a whipping post as well. 
Out at sea, nine miles away, is that " heap of bare and 
splintery crags " known as the Isles of Shoals, familiar 
to the world through the pen of Celia Thaxter. Across 
there is the Navy Yard, in Maine now, but Massa- 
chusetts included Maine on a time. The Saranac, first 
steam vessel of the navy, was built there. The Kear- 
sarge, too, took the water from this yard, and thence she 
sailed away upon her splendid career. And not only 
did the Portsmouth yard lay the keel of the ship that 



PORTSMOUTH 273 

sank the Confederacy's most powerful cruiser, but, 
before the removal of the ship-building timbers from 
Langdon's Island, John Paul Jones' Ranger had been 
launched from the end of Pring's Wharf. 

Seavey's Island has its story, too, a very modem 
tale of the 1700 Spanish prisoners who were there fed, 
lodged and cared for in 1898, so well cared for, indeed, 
that it was not easy to get their consent to be carried 
back to their home country. 

The ancient town of Newcastle seems near at 
hand, but you must cross three bridges to get to 
it. At Kittery Point Sir William Pepperell, called 
" the first American baronet and the only one," lived 
long ago, and what is left of his old house is much 
sought by tourists. And beyond Great Island and 
almost in line with the Isles of Shoals is Odiome's 
Point, where in 1623 the white man first made a settle- 
ment on the soil of New Hampshire. On the Point 
is the oldest burial ground in the State, where lie the 
bones of those who were not able to withstand the 
rigors of their first New England winter. 

Coming down from your observation tower, you 
may well begin your round with a look at the water- 
front. It is here that one gets the strongest impression, 
perhaps, of the antiquity of the town. In the days 
when this was the scene of an extensive commerce, 
especially with the West Indies, Portsmouth was a 
dangerous rival even of Boston and New York. Now 
the piers are deserted. Ceres Street, down which the 



274 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

tides of commerce rolled to the wharves, is lined with 
old warehouses, which once were filled with rum, spices, 
and molasses. In pathetic solicitation the cranes 
reach their long arms from the eaves of these buildings. 
The warehouses are weather-stained; the wharves 
look their age and some of them are worm-eaten. 

Nowadays, one sees scores of persons hurrying for 
the ferry that runs across the river, but this is almost 
the only sign of strenuous Hfe that the cursory visitor 
will find at this point. A half-score of men, some of 
them of patriarchal appearance, are sitting at their 
ease in the open door of one of the old structures. A 
few questions elicit from them a great deal of inter- 
esting information about the past, and the inquirer 
deduces that here is one of those " senates " where all 
great questions are discussed with philosophic calm, 
a debate which goes on and on and never seems to 
arrive at a terminal. These old men fit into the picture 
perfectly. The scene would not be complete without 
them. 

Artists every summer sketch this scene, the row 
of warehouses zigzagging along the river side, the tower 
of St. John's looming just above them, and the ancient 
streets. Linden and Ceres, deserted now, which once 
made one of the marts of the world. The dreamer will 
stand just where the ships used to imload their cargoes, 
and muse upon the past. Dimly there comes to his 
ears the chanting of the sailors at the windlass, and 
dimly to his vision there will appear the wraiths of 



PORTSMOUTH 275 

men in knee-breeches and cocked hats gazing down to- 
ward the ocean. There are tokens of a reviving com- 
merce, hailed by the city with just satisfaction, it is 
true, but the visitor's predominant impression is of the 
past. 

A remarkable river is this upon which they looked as 
you look to-day. Only eleven miles long, the Piscat- 
aqua is broad and deep, with a powerful current which 
so piles up that at the Narrows, even at low tide, there 
are said to be seventy feet of water. When the tide 
is high, the islands, which shut the Portsmouth basin 
from the ocean, and the Maine and New Hampshire 
shores lock in the waters as if they formed a lake. 

As the visitor climbs the hill to Market Street, he 
finds himself right in front of one of the famous man- 
sions of the town. Architecturally, the building is 
beautiful. It was the first of the square, three-story 
type of mansions to be erected in the State. The hall, 
with its mahogany staircase winding to the third floor, 
is well known in Boston and New York, for it is al- 
together exceptional in size and in details of finish. 
Its lines are said to have been reproduced from those 
of an English mansion. The carved mantelpiece in 
the parlor was brought entire from that building across 
the ocean, and its elaborate carvings are attributed 
to Grinling Gibbons, a celebrated architect of the 
period, who is credited with the ornamentation of the 
chapel of Windsor Castle. 

There are a series of portraits upon the walls here, 



276 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

and in almost all the colonial mansions in the city 
one finds generations of former owners done thus in oil. 
To quote Mr. Aldrich once more: " To live in Ports- 
mouth without having a family portrait done by Copley 
is like living in Boston without having an ancestor 
in the Granary burying ground." At the right of the 
gateway is the porter's lodge, a little square building 
with windows commanding the street. The gardens 
are laid out in terraces, and fine chestnuts and elms 
checker the lawns with shade. 

There are three names connected with this house — 
Moffatt, Whipple and Ladd — and with each name 
there are interesting associations. It was built about 
1760 by John Moffatt for his son Samuel. When the 
father came to America in 1729 he brought with him 
as a passenger Bishop Berkeley, whose name is cherished 
at Newport. The son was a Harvard man, but went 
to England for a bride, bringing her to America and 
to this house in 1764. But not for long were they 
able to occupy it in the patrician style which they had 
inaugurated. Reverses came. With a portion of the 
family the husband went to St. Eustatius, where he 
died. His daughter, Mary Tufton Moffatt, he left in 
care of her aunt Catherine, the wife of General 
William Whipple. When the aunt died, the house came 
to the niece, and then in turn to a grand-niece and her 
husband, Alexander Ladd. 

All who care enough for Portsmouth to read the 
history of the town will tell you the story of the Whipple 



PORTSMOUTH 277 

slaves, Prince and Cuffee. It appears that after the West 
Indian exile of Samuel Mofifatt began, General Whipple^ 
being in residence in the mansion, the two slave families 
whom he owned had quarters at the foot of the garden. 
Prince and Cuffee Whipple were said to be sons of 
an African king. The general rendered valuable serv- 
ice in the expedition against Burgoyne which culmi- 
nated in the surrender at Saratoga, He took Prince 
along on the campaign, and promised him his freedom 
if he earned it by brave conduct. When they returned, 
the slave was formally manumitted, and Dinah, his 
widow, is said to have lived until 1832. 

The tale of a jilted bridegroom also must be related 
of General Whipple. Before he was twenty-one he 
commanded a ship and at twenty-nine he left the sea. 
A gallant man he was, bold and fortunate in his 
maritime ventures. He was to marry Mehitabel Cutts. 
The day and the hour came; minister and guests 
were waiting, but no bride appeared. He went to her 
at last, only to find her divested of her wedding finery, 
having decided, she said, " not to be married that 
evening." He reasoned and he pleaded. At last he 
said: " Now or never! " And " never " it turned out 
to be. General Whipple was a member of the Provin- 
cial Congress in 1775, he signed the Declaration of 
Independence, and at fifty-six he died, an eminent and 
respected man. Catherine, his wife, of courtly manners 
and imposing presence, was called the " Madame," 
and survived to make her final public appearance 



278 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

at the bi-centennial celebration of Portsmouth in 
1823. 

St. John's Church, from whose belfry you surveyed 
the city, is not far away, splendidly situated upon the 
crest of a hill, with its cemetery adjoining. The build- 
ing is a severely plain, rectangular structure of brick, 
surmounted by a square tower above which is the 
belfry. Plain as the church is, it pleases the eye, for 
its proportions are excellent. The interior is extremely 
interesting. The old box pews and the wine-glass 
pulpit have been removed, but the sexton overwhelms 
one with stories of the memorials and furnishings 
which the church still contains. There are numerous 
tablets of marble and bronze, a chair which Washing- 
ton occupied when attending service in the building, 
a credence of wood from one of Farragut's flag- 
ships, a plate marking a pew in which Webster and 
his wife used to worship, and various furnishings pre- 
sented by Queen Caroline when the congregation wor- 
shiped in " Queen's Chapel." 

The most novel item in the long inventory is the font 
of porphyritic marble. It is in two compartments, 
with brass covers, which may be locked. Captain 
John Mason, a resident of Portsmouth who had a part 
in the expedition of 1758, brought it from Senegal. 
Tradition has it that it was once a reliquary in a heathen 
temple. 

Another of the most prized possessions of the church 
is one of the four " Vinegar " Bibles in the country. 



PORTSMOUTH 279 

Of the others, one is in Christ Church in Boston, 
another in Philadelphia, and the third is in the Lenox 
Library of New York City. They get their name from 
the mistake the printer made when he rendered the 
parable of the vineyard as the parable of the vinegar. 
The bell which hangs in the tower has a history also. 
It was brought from Louisburg in 1745, when that 
supposedly impregnable fortress was taken by Sir 
William Pepperell, an exploit which made him famous 
and gained him his baronetcy. The bell was recast 
by Paul Revere after it had been cracked in the great 
fire of 1806, and after a century of service it was recast 
again. There are statements of its history upon its 
rim, and these lines: 

" From St. John's steeple 
I call the people 
On holy days 
To prayer and praise." 

The parish was foimded in 1638, revived as Queen's 
Chapel in 1732, and became St. John's Church in 
1 79 1. The comer-stone of the present building was 
laid in 1807. Curious and amusing are the tales which 
the sexton pours into your ears about this old church 
and its predecessor. The venerable rector, the Rev. 
Arthur Browne, was called upon on a time to conduct 
the obsequies of Colonel Theodore Atkinson. The 
widow appeared in her pew wearing the habiliments 
of mourning on the following Sunday. But on Monday 



280 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

the rector's services were again called into requisition 
in her behalf, and he read the marriage service for her 
and John Wentworth, the last of the royal governors 
of New Hampshire. His cousin, Frances Deering 
Wentworth, had been attached to him before her 
first marriage and she was but twenty-three when she 
took him for her second husband. At thirty-two John 
Wentworth was one of the richest and most prominent 
men in America, a graduate of Harvard College, and 
honored to-day as its founder by the charter of Dart- 
mouth College. 

Washington came to the old chapel in 1789, attended 
by his secretary, Tobias Lear, who was a Portsmouth 
man. The two chairs presented to the chapel by Queen 
Caroline were occupied by these visitors, one of whom 
had destroyed her country's power in America. In 
the great fire but one of the chairs was saved. An exact 
counterpart of it was made at once, but neither was 
marked, and no one knows to-day which one was oc- 
cupied by the President. 

But after all perhaps the most pleasing incident 
connected with the church is the story of the way hand- 
some Nicholas Rousselet " popped the question " on 
a day when he sat with pretty Katherine Moffat in 
her father's pew. He was guest and suitor, and he 
had been industriously wooing the daughter of his host 
for some time. On this Sunday he handed Katherine 
a Bible opened at the Second Epistle of St. John, which 
is addressed to " the elect lady," and in which he had 



PORTSMOUTH 281 

marked the fifth verse: "And now I beseech thee^ 
lady, not as though I wrote a new commandment- 
unto thee, but that which we had from the beginnings 
that we love one another." Katherine was ready witted 
with her reply, and she seems to have had her mind 
made up. She returned the Bible with her finger on 
the sixteenth verse of the first chapter of the Book of 
Ruth: " Whither thou goest I will go, and where thou 
lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people," 
and so on through the familiar passage. Presumably 
the negotiations were closed in the orthodox manner 
in some less public place, and it is to be hoped that 
they " lived happily ever afterward." 

The graveyard, with its ivy-covered retaining walls, 
has the appearance of many a parish cemetery nestling 
up against the stone walls of an old English church. 
It is kept trimmed and groomed, and no symptoms of 
neglect are tolerated. There are colonels and generals 
and governors here, and armorial bearings upon many 
tombs. Every step takes you atop the ashes of some 
notable. The sexton has more stories here also. One 
which you will be sure to remember is that of the woman 
buried here who caused a bottle of ether to be put in 
her coffin because she feared she might be buried alive, 
and if she came back to consciousness she reasoned 
that she would have the ether at hand to produce a 
succession of sleeping periods, which she hoped would 
last until the resurrection trumpet should sound. 

A block from the church is the Warner house, the 



282 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

oldest brick building in the city, erected perhaps as 
early as 17 15 at a cost of six thousand pounds. The 
bricks were brought from Holland and the story is that 
the first load was wrecked on the Isles of Shoals three 
leagues from port, after traveling safely a thousand 
leagues at sea. The builder was a Scotchman, said to 
have founded the first iron works in America, and he 
married one of the sixteen children of that John Went- 
worth who was lieutenant-governor of the province 
from 1 7 13 to 1730. Curiously enough, the house bears 
not the name of Captain Archibald Macpheadris, the 
builder, but that of his son-in-law Jonathan Warner. 
The writer of a collection of charming sketches of 
Portsmouth, Mr. Charles W. Brewster, says that Mr. 
Warner was " the last of the cocked hats." 

The house has stood almost two hundred years and 
looks good for two hundred more. It is three-storied, 
with luthem windows projecting from its gambrel 
roof, and the roof is decked and balustraded with a 
lantern cupola in the center and two huge chimneys 
at each end. As in many others of these colonial 
houses, the hall is one of the great exhibits in the eyes 
of the modem visitor. This hall is of generous propor- 
tions, running from the front to the garden in the rear, 
with the stairs ascending upon an easy grade to the floor 
above. The walls were ornamented elaborately by an 
unknown artist, whose frescoes, hidden for generations, 
were uncovered under four layers of paper about forty 
years ago. Opening from the hall upon either side 



PORTSMOUTH 283 

are huge rooms, each large enough and stately enough 
to be a drawing-room. These and the hall are paneled 
to the ceiling in wood, whose whiteness is now verging 
upon the yellow of age, and about the mantel shelves 
are wood carvings, simple and beautiful. The tiles 
and hearthstones, like the bricks for the walls, came 
from Holland. Look at the windows and you see how 
fortresslike these walls are. They are eighteen inches 
through, giving room for the shutters to fold into the 
casings. 

The house of " Tom Bailey," the " bad boy " him- 
self, is but a block distant, and great is the dividend 
it pays the visitor who makes even the investment 
of an hour of time and a mite of appreciative attention. 
With the fire-proof building beside it and the garden 
in the rear, this house, now the Thomas Bailey Aldrich 
Memorial Museum, is one of the most interesting lit- 
erary shrines in the country. The subscriptions for 
the purchase of the house for memorial purposes ranged 
from one dollar to a thousand, and when it was re- 
covered from alien hands it was put back with reverent 
fidelity into the condition of the " bad boy's " time. 
And what a time that boy had! The river is just at 
the foot of the street, and on one of those old wharves 
he fired the train of powder. Boom! Boom! And 
frightened and puzzled Portsmouth awoke and kept 
awake for some time afterward. 

This house belonged to the grandfather of the boy 
who persisted in becoming a poet in spite of all the 



284 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

pains his people took to make him a business man. 
From the interior you have a clear-cut impression of a 
typical New England home of three generations ago. 
All the rooms are full of the furniture the grandfathers 
used. There are Chippendale chairs, samplers made 
by the poet's mother, many fine examples of old china, 
numbers of old engravings and oil paintings, a collection 
of old silver, and a curious candle-stand with sockets 
for two candles on adjustable arms. 

The kitchen attracts most attention, save for the 
little hall bedroom up-stairs. The immense fireplace 
with the kettle hanging from the crane, the sperm oil 
lamps and the Windsor chair, the wooden sink and the 
utensils ranged about the room produce a very dis- 
tinct notion of the conditions of a hundred years ago. 

One goes up the stairs, past the tall hall clock and 
the old fire buckets, to the bedrooms above. In all 
four of the large rooms is a four-poster with a canopy. 
One has a quilt with the initials of the quilters worked 
in the border, which the caretaker says " everybody 
who sees it wants to buy." The little room is the cham- 
ber of the boy whom all the world came to know. It 
contains the Httle single bed, with the shelf of books 
on the wall above it, and a little white vest thrown 
across it, as if the owner might step in any minute and 
put it on. Indeed, one of the charms of the house is 
that it all seems ready, not for inspection, but for use. 
The offensive donors' cards and the labeling tags are 
conspicuous by their absence. 



PORTSMOUTH 285 

The brick memorial building was dedicated in the 
June of 1908. It contains autographed photographs 
of a host of the best and most famous writers of the Old 
Worid and the New, the original manuscripts of many- 
famous works, and a complete set of Aldrich first edi- 
tions, together with the table on which the " bad boy " 
story was written and a large number of literary and 
art treasures. Not the least interesting of them all is 
a dinner menu in a frame on the wall, with the auto- 
graphs on the margins of Mark Twain, W. D. Howells, 
Henry Irving, Laurence Hutton, and others well 
known to fame. One looks at it and smiles to see how 
like college boys these eminent banqueters were. 

With an exclamation of joy you step into the garden. 
It is a small enclosure, with a ten-foot lattice between 
it and the next house. Down the middle runs a walk 
of white cobbles. There are an arbor and seat at the 
rear. Arched against the back of the house is a trellis 
with Italian blinds rolling upon it. In this secluded 
enclosure are the old, old flowers, cared for clearly by 
some one who loves them. There are hollyhocks, helio- 
tropes, pansies, striped grass, hop vines, and various 
other shrubs and flowers — indeed, every flower men- 
tioned in Mr. Aldrich's poetry is here. Just at the rear 
door the caretaker points out the place where the pony 
ate the squash pie, and your laugh is as hearty as it 
was when, up in the attic, which is full of Aldrich relics, 
3^ou saw the old hair trunk on which the " bad boy " 
tried to get the hair to grow. 



286 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

Let " Tom " Bailey himself tell a small bit of the 
story of this house. How the boy felt toward the sol- 
emnly awful Sabbath is indicated in this passage: 

"It is Sunday morning. I should premise by saying that 
the deep gloom which settled over everything set in like a heavy 
fog early on Saturday evening. 

" Our parlor is by no means thrown open every day. It 
is open this June morning, and is pervaded by a strong smell of 
center- table. The furniture of the room, and the little china 
ornaments on the mantel-piece have a constrained, unfamiliar 
look. My grandfather sits in a mahogany chair, reading a large 
Bible covered with green baize. Miss Abigail occupies one end 
of the sofa, and has her hands crossed stiffly in her lap. I sit 
in the comer, crushed. Robinson Crusoe and Gil Bias are in close 
confinement. Baron Trenck, who managed to escape from the 
fortress of Glatz, can't for the life of him get out of our sitting- 
room closet." 

And how amusingly and faithfully true to the boy 
nature is this passage: 

" The door at the right of the hall leads into the sitting- 
room. It was in this room where my grandfather sat in his 
arm-chair the greater part of the evening, reading the River- 
mouth ' Barnacle,' the local newspaper. There was no gas in 
those days, and the Captain read by the aid of a small block- 
tin lamp which he held in one hand. I observed that he had a 
habit of dropping off into a doze every three or four minutes. 
Two or three times, to my vast amusement, he scorched the 
edges of the newspaper with the wick of the lamp; and at about 
half-past eight o'clock I had the satisfaction — I am sorry to 
confess it was a satisfaction — of seeing the Rivermouth ' Bar- 
nacle ' in flames." 



PORTSMOUTH 287 

At the next comer beyond the Bailey house is the 
Pitt Tavern, another of the important assets of anti- 
quarian Portsmouth. But it conveys no impression 
of its historical importance to the casual observer. It 
wears a worn and " reduced " look. The stranger will 
not guess what it is until he reads the tablet which the 
Sons of the Revolution have placed upon it. 

" The Earl of HaUfax and William Pitt Hotel 
Erected in 1770 
General Lafayette Visited here in 1782 
Also Louis Philippe Who Was Afterwards 

King of France 
This is the Last Spot Where Washington 
Personally Complimented Our State Through 
Its Official Dignitaries in 1789." 

This is not the tavern where the innkeeper's wife 
chided pretty Martha Hilton. That hostelry was in 
•Queen Street, now State Street; this old inn, built by 
the same landlord, is at the comer of Atkinson and 
Court Streets. 

Now the sightseer will go across the town to look at 
some of the other large colonial mansions. He should 
move slowly. Indeed, he will soon perceive that any 
gait faster than a saunter will not be in keeping with 
his surroundings. He will note the whitewashed stone 
walls, the flagstone pavements with the grass growing 
between the stones, the dirt walks with the stone co- 
pings, and the leisurely up-hill and down-dale way in 
w^hich some of the streets amble along. 



288 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

Arriving in Pleasant Street, he comes upon a beauti- 
ful scene. Trees and dignified old homes are upon each 
hand. Standing well back from the street, with a fine 
stretch of lawn and some big elms and horse-chestnuts 
in front of it, is the mansion which was copied for the 
New Hampshire State building at the Jamestown expo- 
sition. This is the Governor Langdon house. There are 
two small brick lodges in front of it on the sidewalk 
line, guard-houses on the flank of the main entrance. 
Columns support the entrance portico, with the little 
balcony above it. One of the last commissions executed 
by Stanford White was the making of the plans for an 
addition to the side and rear of this mansion. 

The hall runs through the middle of the house, after 
the manner of these old houses, and the staircase, which 
comes with easy tread down from the halls above, has an 
unusual newel which the keen-eyed will note, a double 
spiral with four bent uprights. There are heavily 
wainscoted reception-rooms, in which some one has 
suggested there used " to assemble the Langdon 
salon." The Governor Langdon who built the house 
was one of New Hampshire's most sturdy patriots, be- 
coming in time the first president of the United States 
Senate. As a matter of course one learns that the 
Father of his Coimtry was made at home here, but an 
unusual number of distinguished personages were en- 
tertained here as well, as witness a list which includes 
the names of Lafayette, Henry Knox, Elbridge Gerry, 
John Hancock, Marquis de Chastellux, the traveler 




Pleasant Street. Portsmouth. Langdon House on right 



PORTSMOUTH 289 

who kept a journal, Louis Philippe, the future King of 
France, and two other sons of the Due d'Orleans, to 
say nothing of that literary magnate who ruled in 
Portsmouth nearly half a century, the Rev. Charles 
Burroughs, who was no mere incidental guest, but who 
resided here during the forty-seven years of his pas- 
torate of St. John's Church. 

Just across from this mansion are the house of the 
Rev. Dr. Langdon and the Old North Church parson- 
age, fine old buildings, but of another type and 
without the grounds at the front which give added 
impressiveness to the Langdon house and to the Mark 
H. Wentworth house, which is next below the Langdon. 
This Wentworth home is somewhat similar in general 
appearance to the great mansion which is its nearest 
neighbor. There is another Wentworth mansion not 
far away, the Governor John Wentworth house, which 
also ranks among the best of these Portsmouth homes 
that have come down from the old regime. 

The name " Old North " recalls the remarkable pas- 
torate of the Rev. Joseph Buckminster in that his- 
toric parish; he began his ministry there in 1779 
and continued in the service for a third of a century. 
As he entered the building on a Sunday in full canon- 
icals, with robe and bands and three-cornered hat, he 
made an impressive figure, say the old writers. The last 
time he preached in the church he gave out at the end 
of the service, in a voice of deep feeling which seemed 
ominously prophetic to his hearers, the old hymn: 



290 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

" When I can read my title clear 
To mansions in the skies, 
I'll bid farewell to every fear, 
And wipe my weeping eyes." 

But the most pathetic incident of his life was the 
preaching of the ordination sermon of his son. The 
father was an unflinching Puritan, the son a Liberal. 
Their correspondence shows how paganlike the son's 
faith looked to the old school theologian. And to the 
very end the father was unable to agree that there was 
any hope for one who held to the milder belief to which 
the son gave his adherence. 

There are three Went worth houses in Portsmouth, so 
let us clear up the puzzle of the family relationships. 
Five John Wentworths resided in the town at differ- 
ent times. Lieutenant-Governor John Wentworth was 
in office from 17 13 to 1730; Benning Wentworth was 
his son and served as governor from 1741 to 1767, and 
the John Wentworth who succeeded Benning was his 
nephew, staying in office until flight became necessary 
in 1775. Mark Hunking Wentworth was brother to 
Benning, being son of John, the lieutenant-governor, 
and father of John, the governor. The Wentworths 
were old-time rivals in comxmerce and politics of the 
Pepperell family. Mark was the richest of the Ports- 
mouth merchants. John it was whose sweetheart mar- 
ried Colonel Atkinson while he was absent in England, 
only very speedily to take him for her second husband 
upon the demise of the colonel. 



PORTSMOUTH 291 

The house of the last of the royal governors is of 
wood, with a gambrel roof, a great hall, and several 
spacious rooms. The marble chimney-piece was broken 
by a mob in 1775, for although the governor was popu- 
lar, he sided with the king and had to flee when the 
Revolutionary excitement came to the point of open 
rebellion. A path leads through the terraced garden, 
and down that path the governor and his wife walked 
away into exile on an April night in the year of Lexing- 
ton. His college friend had been John Adams, and in 
Paris in 1778 the exiled Loyalist and the representative 
of the Colonies met amicably and enjoyed in some de- 
gree an agreeable intimacy. 

Some stories there are to tell of this governor and his 
lady, for they seem to have been an eccentric couple. 
The lady who put an interval of less than a fortnight 
between husband one and husband two, had, says tra- 
dition, a will of her own. " Once upon a time " she 
went to a social gathering without her husband's ap- 
proval. He locked her out of the house. The night 
was cold. She began to scream. From the window 
her husband looked out upon her plight. But when 
the lady declared she would throw herself into the 
water hard by and drown herself, rather than endure 
such an indignity, and ran from the door, the husband 
was frightened, and hurried out of the house after her. 
The wife was the more clever of the two, in this in- 
stance at least, for she doubled back, entered the house, 
turned the latch against her husband, and the governor 



292 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

was left to get what comfort he might out of the fact 
that she was safe, as her face at the window testified. 
But of physical comfort he had none, for his garb was 
not of an appropriate nature for outside wear, whatever 
the weather conditions. 

Next in the itinerary comes the Wendell house. It 
is next to Haven Park, in which stands an equestrian 
statue of Fitz John Porter. This frame mansion is par- 
ticularly interesting, because so large a part of its origi- 
nal equipment has been retained until the present 
time. The Chippendale furniture and the Flemish cut 
glass, which were imported by the builder of the house, 
are here, and every visitor examines them with great 
zest. All the rooms are excellent architecturally, and 
the hall is noteworthy. The rooms below contain a 
large collection of antiques. There are old broadsides, 
orders signed by John Hancock and others of colonial 
fame, relics of the battle of Bennington, commissions 
of various British kings and French as well, old en- 
gravings, " shin plasters," a Willard clock, and a quan- 
tity of other objects which illustrate the life of the 
past. One notes in this house, as in many others he has 
seen, the fine brass locks, huge square rectangles, with 
their pure nickel keys. 

Now one is almost surfeited with these mansions and 
ready for a change. So he undertakes the tramp to 
the Shillaber house, where, indeed, he finds something 
different. On the way, however, he stops at the Athe- 
naeum, which is one of the chief institutions of the city. 



PORTSMOUTH 293 

It is not a public library, although courtesies are offered 
to the casual caller. It houses about twenty thousand 
volumes and a collection of rare books and papers. It 
has been a Ubrary since 1817, and the collections are 
for the use of the stockholders, of whom the number 
is limited to one hundred. But the discerning will 
stand before the building a long time and scan its archi- 
tecture. It is of brick, with columns upon the front 
of the two upper stories, and graceful round-topped 
windows and door piercing the first story. There are 
many old residents of Portsmouth who rank the Athe- 
naeum, the building and the collections which it houses, 
first among the possessions of the city. 

Other houses there are to see, many of them. To a 
gambrel-roofed dwelling in Vaughan Street Daniel 
Webster brought his bride when he was twenty-six 
years old. He lived also in two other houses in Ports- 
mouth and removed to Boston in 18 16. There are in- 
teresting incidents and much of historical importance 
associated with the Old South Church and parish. 
If only to illustrate how famiHar a quotation may be, 
and how lost many who cite it would be if asked to give 
chapter and verse for it, the name of Jonathan Mitchell 
Sewall must be mentioned. His lyrics were enormously 
popular in the Revolution. The lines which justify 
this reference to him come at the very end of an epilogue 
which he wrote for Addison's Tragedy of Cato. The 
tragedy was played in Portsmouth in 1778 and the epi- 
logue was recited. 



294 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

" Rise, then, my countrymen! For fight prepare, 
Gird on your swords, and fearless rush to war! 
For your grieved country nobly dare to die 
And empty all your veins for liberty. 
No pent up Utica contracts your powers, 
But the whole boundless continent is yours." 

The ShiUaber house is not a mansion. It seems im- 
gracious to call it a " shack." Yet that is the term 
which most readily comes to mind. It is a little, one- 
story building, end to the street, and quite shut in 
by larger structures. Here there is no architecture 
to describe. The house was the home of the creator 
of " Mrs. Partington " and " Ike," and for that reason 
it is of right included in the itinerary. But the thistles 
are taller than the pickets of the fence at the rear, 
and it is too unkempt to be remembered with urmiixed 
pleasure. Once this was the " little house by the river," 
for in the old days the mill pond came up to the foot 
of the garden; where were fruit trees, the currant and 
gooseberry bushes, the flower beds and the vegetable 
patches. An aunt of the *' ShiUaber boys " died here, 
who is understood to have been the prototype of the 
" Mrs. Ruth Partington, widow of the late Corp. 
Paul," whom Benjamin P. ShiUaber made a household 
topic in hundreds of thousands of American homes. 
The house is still occupied by a descendant of this 
aunt, who served the author as a model. He was for 
many years a violin player — he will refer to him- 
self as a " fiddler " and tell you how the old-style 



PORTSMOUTH 295 

dances have gone out — and now he has turned tO' 
taxidermy. He has an eagle on exhibition and other 
specimens of his work. 

Last in the tour of Portsmouth one should go to 
Little Harbor to see the Penning Went worth mansion. 
This is the house in which Parkman spent some part 
of every summer for years, and in which he wrote 
portions of his historical works. The distance is not 
at all tiring for an ordinary walker, and you can motor 
out in a few minutes. 

Quoting Thomas Bailey Aldrich again, of this house 
he said : " Time and change have laid their hands more 
lightly on this pile than on any other of the old homes 
of Portsmouth." It stands on the shore of the river 
and the groimds are embanked with high stone re- 
taining walls. One looks across at the Hotel Went- 
worth, which came to the notice of the world at the 
time of the negotiations which ended the war be- 
tween Japan and Russia. The grounds are spacious 
and quite convey the suggestion of a coimtry es- 
tate. 

The house itself has been called an " architectural 
freak." The main building has for the most part 
two stories, with irregular wings, forming three sides of 
a square which opens on the water. The wings look 
like a cluster of whimsical extensions, although all 
were built at the same time. But it is a fine mansion, 
nevertheless, as one discovers as soon as he enters the 
building — 



296 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

"... a pleasant mansion, an abode 
Near and yet hidden from the great highroad, 
Sequestered among trees, a noble pile, 
Baronial and colonial in its style; 
Gables and dormer-windows everywhere. 
And stacks of chimneys rising high in air, — 
Pandaean pipes, on which all winds that blew 
Made mournful music the whole winter through." 

The present owner has restored the interior as closely 
as possible to the original condition, and he courteously 
permits visitors to satisfy in reasonable degree their 
curiosity. " One crosses the threshold to enter into 
the colonial," says Aldrich. " The past has halted 
courteously waiting for you to catch up with 
it." 

The mansion is said to have had fifty-two rooms, 
forty-five of which are still in use, and some of these 
are oddly connected by little stairways and narrow 
passages. It is the Council Chamber which visitors 
most wish to see. This is a large, high-studded room, 
done in the best style of more than one hundred and 
fifty years ago. The ornamentation of the room 
centers in the huge mantel, which was carved with 
chisel and knife and is said to have required the labor 
of a skilled workman for a full year. Beyond are racks 
for the muskets of the governor's guard; other racks 
are ranged along the hall without. These are supposed 
to have been the work of St. Etienne, gunmaker to 
the King of France. 



PORTSMOUTH 297 

Off the Council Chamber opens the big bilHard- 
room, and off that are three small card-rooms. The 
billiard-room contains a spinet, which the present 
occupant of the house " considers probably the only- 
piece of furniture which belonged to the Went worths." 
This room has the heavy beams of the ceiling exposed, 
as do some of the smaller rooms adjacent. 

The hall by which one has access to the Council 
Chamber contains a small stairway, taking one to the 
level of the parlor, which is a room of modest size 
containing many antiquities. The windows through- 
out the house are of eighteen and twenty-four panes, 
set half in each sash. This seems characteristic of the 
colonial residences in the city. 

It was in the Council Chamber, built by Benning 
Went worth on a scale grand for 1750 and grand for 
the twentieth century as well, that the governor and 
his advisers conferred upon affairs of state. And it 
was in this room also that the romance had its climax 
which has made the old mansion the best known in 
all Portsmouth. For it was before that great mantel 
that the governor stood to be married to his servant 
maid, Martha Hilton. 

Longfellow has told the tale in his poem of Lady 
Wentworth. The story is quite like that of King 
Cophetua and Zenelephon. 

" Cophetua swore a royal oath: 
This beggar maid shall be my Queen! " 



298 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

The governor on his sixtieth birthday gave an elab- 
orate dinner, at which, as a matter of course, his rector, 
the Rev. Arthur Browne of St. John's, was present. 
After dinner came the grand surprise. Martha Hilton 
came quietly into the room. She had been but a poor 
and beautiful girl in the town, proud too, perhaps, and 
once she had been heard to make a half -laughing and 
half-serious prediction that the time would come when 
she would ride in her own carriage. 

Up spoke the governor, upon the appearance of 
Martha, and these were his amazing words: 

" This is my birthday: it shall likewise be 
My wedding-day, and you shall marry me! " 

The guests were astonished. The clergyman hes- 
itated. Then the governor commanded. And Mr. 
Browne 

"... read the service loud and clear: 
' Dearly beloved, we are gathered here,* 
And so on to the end." 

So it was that Martha Hilton became a great lady. 
Later she was widowed, only to become the bride of 
a retired English army officer, who also bore the name 
of Wentworth. Him, too, she survived, but to the end 
of her long life she was a resident of Portsmouth, " the 
old town by the sea." 



PORTLAND 

" Often I think of the beautiful town 
That is seated by the sea; 
Often in thought go up and down 
The pleasant streets of that dear old town, 
And my youth comes back, to me." 

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 

With a volume of Longfellow's poems in your pocket, 
and two or three hours of reading of the history of 
Portland, you will be ready for a pilgrimage to 

"... the beautiful town 
That is seated by the sea." 

You will find Portland a thriving city that is pre- 
dominantly modem, but with reminiscences of the 
colonial scattered about its streets, and with associa- 
tions, historical and literary, that will yield ample 
compensation for the bit of time and labor involved in 
the trip. 

First, to get the comprehensive notion of the 
neighborhood, skurry through the city and go to the 
Observatory, a red-shingled, octagonal, windmill-like 
tower, about one hundred feet high and two hundred 
feet above sea level. Built by the ship owners of the 



300 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

town in 1807, the shipping men still pay its bills, and 
a lookout on the platform at the top has a glass at 
his eye every day during the quarantine hoiirs, simrise 
to sunset. In the old times many were the eyes that 
were gladdened by the flags flown from the staff up 
here announcing the home-coming of some long gone 
vessel. 

Now you see that Portland is built on a peninsula, 
about three miles long, that juts into Casco Bay, 
northeast from the mainland. It has tide water on 
either side, and the shores slope gradually until they 
reach a height that averages one hundred feet. This 
is Munjoy's Hill at one end of the peninsula, and there 
is Bramhall's Hill yonder at the other extremity. That 
is Congress Street, running the whole length of the 
narrow stretch of land and making the main artery 
of business. It goes on the ridge all the way, a sort 
of backbone of the city. 

You will study for a long time this view of Casco 
Bay. When Captain John Smith, first of the summer 
voyagers to visit this famous coast, was here in 161 4, 
he said: "Westward of Kennebec is the country of 
Aucocisco, in the bottom of a deep bay full of many 
great islands, which divide it into many great harbors." 
There are a lot of these islands, more than in any body 
of water of like extent on the United States coast. 
They are of many sizes. Some are rocky islets, covered 
by the sea at high tide. Legend says, what it says 
also of Winnepesaukee, that there are three hundred 



PORTLAND 301 

and sixty-five in all, an island for every day in the year. 
Whittier knew this bay and admired its scenic beauty, 
as witness the lines in his poem of The Ranger: 

" Nowhere fairer, sweeter, rarer, 
Does the golden-locked fruit-bearer 

Through his painted woodlands stray; 
Than where hillside oaks and beeches 
Overlook the long, blue reaches. 
Silver coves and pebbled beaches, 

And green isles of Casco Bay; 

Nowhere day, for delay. 
With a tenderer look beseeches, 

* Let me with my charmed earth stay.' " 

If you have done your duty by your Longfellow — 
and Portland is almost as much Longfellow's city to- 
day as ever it was — you will recall nearly the whole of 
his lines, meditated for a long time and finally written 
in 1855, called My Lost Youth. The poet was always 
coming back to his home city, strolling about among 
his early haunts. In the periods when travel took him 
afar, he managed to return almost every year to the 
home of his fathers, and in his letters there are many 
expressions of the affection and longing with which 
he remembered and treasured the associations of his 
boyhood and youth. To-day as you survey the bay 
and the city and the peaks of the White Mountains 
sixty miles from the top of this tower, the lines of the 
poem come to you with a tenderly pathetic ap- 
peal: 



302 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

" I can see the shadowy lines of its trees, 

And catch, in sudden gleams. 
The sheen of the far-surrounding seas, 
And islands that were the Hesperides 

Of all my boyish dreams. 

" I remember the black wharves and the slips, 
And the sea-tides tossing free; 
And Spanish sailors with bearded lips, 
And the beauty and mystery of the ships. 
And the magic of the sea." 

Out there is Portland Head Light. Fort Georges is 
nearer at hand, now a storehouse for torpedoes and 
ammunition; Jefferson Davis, who was chairman of 
the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs in 1848, 
caused it to be built. There are the Great and Little 
Diamond, Peak's Island, and a large number of others, 
most of them covered with summer homes. Elevators 
line the harbor front. To the north is the United 
States Marine Hospital, on a peninsula reached by the 
trolley to Yarmouth. 

Before going down, you turn once more for a long 
look at the beautiful bay. Then the lookout, noting 
your interest and admiration, will discourse to you 
upon any number of interesting incidents. Portland 
Light was the first built on the coast ; its beacon began 
to blaze in January, 1791. The shore on which it 
stands is bold and rocky and the spray in storms is 
flung at times clear to the top of the lighthouse. More 
than twenty miles down the bay is Orr's Island, the 



PORTLAND 303 

scene of Mrs Stowe's Pearl of Orr's Island. Ragged 
Island is supposed to be the " Elm Island " of the 
stories of the Rev. Elijah Kellogg. 

Then you are reminded of the fight between the 
Boxer and the Enterprise in 1813. 

" I remember the sea-fight far away, 
How it thundered o'er the tide! 
And the dead captains, as they lay 
In their graves, o'erlooking the tranquil bay 
Where they in battle died." 

The facts poured into your ears afford an interesting 
commentary upon that stanza. The fight was on a 
Sunday in the September of 18 13. Eariy the people 
began to gather about the Observatory. They knew 
the combat was imminent. The keeper of that day 
admitted a few of his friends and the proprietors of 
the tower, but those excluded stayed at hand. Seguin 
lighthouse is forty miles away, but clearly seen on a 
bright day. The keeper saw the Enterprise and the 
Boxer fire their challenging guns, and, when he told 
the crowds below, they cheered, regardless of the 
sanctities of the Sabbath. When the battle came off, 
the smoke could be seen, but the guns were too far 
away for these watchers to hear. The excitement cul- 
minated on Monday, when the Enterprise was signaled 
leading in a prize under the same flag. The dead com- 
manders lay on the decks, each wrapped in the flag 
under which he had fought. Then Portland heard 



304 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

how the colors of the Boxer were nailed to the mast, how 
the Yankee gunners swept her deck from stem to stem 
again and again, and how her brave captain was cut. 
in two by an eighteen-pound shot. 

As one comes down the hill, he recalls that this- 
was the scene of an Indian ambush that cost fourteen 
lives, and the histories will tell him about the treaty 
Lieutenant-Governor Dummer made with the Indians 
in 1 718. Then here in 1775 Colonel Thompson seized 
Henry Mowatt, as he was skulking among the trees, 
and for revenge Mowatt burned the town, making the 
first of the conflagrations from which Portland, like New- 
buryport and others of these old towns, has suffered. 

British ships, four in nimiber, for nine long hours 
pitched bombs, grape-shot and red-hot cannon-balls 
into a town which could make no defense whatever. 
About three-quarters of the whole population, three 
hundred of the four hundred families of the place, 
were left homeless, and many of them destitute. One 
of the Mowatt cannon-balls is displayed in the town 
to this day. It fell in the meeting-house of the First 
Parish, and when the present church was built on the 
same site, the ball was placed in the ceiling and the 
central chandelier hung from it. 

When next a British squadron entered the harbor 
of Portland, the ships came on a very different errand. 
Just eighty-five years to a day after the bombardment, 
five men-of-war of the English navy manned their 
yards and thundered broadsides as the Prince of Wales, 




Longfellow's Birthplace, Portland 



PORTLAND 305 

the late Edward VII., then a youth of nineteen, 
embarked for home after his American tour. The 
royal standard of Great Britain was displayed in this 
-country for the first time on that October day of i860. 

Another great pageant, only as somber as that of 
i860 was brilliant, was witnessed in this harbor in 
1870. Again a British squadron came up the bay; the 
vessels were convoyed by battle-ships of the fleet of the 
United States. The most powerful fighting vessel 
that up to that time had ever been floated had been 
sent by the queen to convey to the land of his birth 
the body of George Peabody, then hailed as the great- 
est philanthropist in history. It was a day in February. 
There had been a storm which had coated every tree 
of the city, the harbor islands, and the cape with 
ice. And when the imposing procession of boats 
from the ships of the two nations, with their flags 
draped, their oars muffled, and minute gims booming 
from the squadrons and the forts, came ashore with the 
casket, the mourning emblems were in sharp antithe- 
sis to the scintillating aspect of Nature. 

One other story of the harbor ought to be recalled 
before you leave this place of splendid views and begin 
the round of the city, the story of one of the most 
remarkable incidents in the long history of war at sea. 
In June, 1863, the Caleb Gushing, of the United States 
revenue cutter service, was in this harbor. A Confed- 
erate privateer, the Tacony, had been destroying ship- 
ping off the coast of New England. This privateer, 



306 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

shrewdly commanded, took the schooner Archer, put. 
her own armament aboard the prize, manned her, and 
audaciously sailed into the harbor of Portland. The 
object was to bum a couple of gunboats, but they were 
too well watched for the attempt to be made. But 
there was the Gushing getting ready to go out after the 
Tacony, which had been burned when the Archer was. 
made over into a Southern ship. A surprise was tried, 
and succeeded, partly, no doubt, because the captain 
of the cutter was just dead and a lieutenant was in 
command. Then forttme turned against the daring 
privateer. All she needed was a respectable wind and 
soon the sleeping city and the menacing forts could be 
left far astern. But she was becalmed. Steamers came 
out in pursuit of her where she lay just below the forts. 
Many supposed that the lieutenant in command, who 
had been bom in Georgia, had turned against the 
country whose uniform he wore. But that lieutenant 
refused to disclose the secret of the location of the 
magazine and the captors were without ammunition. 
They set fire to the cutter and she blew up. They 
themselves were captured and the Archer also was taken. 
And thousands of persons watched these strange scenes 
from the house roofs and the hills. 

Portland was again destroyed by fire in 1866. A 
firecracker carelessly thrown by a boy on Independence 
Day started the conflagration which the fire depart- 
ments of Portland ind a score of other cities, Boston 
included, were not able to stop. It was as big a fire as 



PORTLAND 307 

the great fire in Chicago, the size of the towns con- 
sidered. In that month there was a city of tents on 
this hill. And late in that July Longfellow said in a 
letter to a friend: " I have been in Portland since the 
fire. Desolation, desolation, desolation! It reminds 
me of Pompeii, that ' sepult city,' " 

No New England town has a right to consider itself 
entirely equipped for the visits of pilgrims and tourists 
unless it has an old cemetery, well kept preferably, 
but tolerated, even if it be unkempt, for the sake of 
the tombs it may contain. Down the hill a distance, 
on Congress Street, is Portland's oldest, called the 
Eastern Cemetery. For two hundred years it was the 
only ground for graves within the present city limits. 
It now covers six acres and is crowded with tombs. 
The long inscriptions are found here, and the urns 
and the drooping willows, as one might expect. 

Lieutenant Henry Wadsworth, for whom Longfellow 
was named, is buried here, the boy who lost his life 
in the gallant exploit against Tripoli. Then Captain 
Samuel Blythe and Captain William Burroughs, the 
Boxer and Enterprise heroes, are here, lying side by 
side in the impressive amity of death. Theirs are two 
of the three table tombs which make a conspicuous 
group of moniunents, the third being that of Lieutenant 
Waters, who was wounded mortally in the same action. 
The inscription says that the tomb of the American 
captain was erected by " a passing stranger." 

Now it will be well to leave Congress Street and 



308 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

take the down-hill way to the comer of Fore and Han- 
cock Streets. Here is a plain, three-story frame house, 
with a triangle of grass fenced in at the comer, and 
bearing a tablet which informs the stranger that it was 
the birthplace of Hemy W. Longfellow. February 27, 
1807. The parents of the poet were married in the 
old Wads worth home, a house which is the chief 
shrine of the city. But for a few years they lived else- 
where, and for several months in this house on what 
was then the water-front of the town. 

To-day the house looks out upon the Grand Trunk 
depot, freight house and tracks. Just over the roofs 
are the masts of the ships. This is all " made " land. 
The sea has been evicted from a portion of its old 
domain. In the time of the Longfellows' residence, 
the windows looked directly out upon the activities 
of the port just across the street from the home. 

This is the old part of the city. It was not touched by 
the great fire of half a century ago. The place where 
the original settler, George Cleeves, took up his home 
in 1633, attracted by the brook which yielded him 
fresh water, is not far distant. Three houses above 
on the up-hill street is the birthplace of Thomas B. — 
" Czar " — Reed. 

The region has deteriorated, naturally, but some 
remnants of the really ancient Portland are here still. 
One pauses to look about him at the comer of Fore 
and India Streets, India Street was probably the 
earUest thoroughfare. It was opened about 1680, and 







The Chadut'ck Mansion, Portland 



PORTLAND 309 

up to 1866 it was a fine old street, with mansions and 
terraced gardens on its slopes. 

You feel that you must leave the Wadsworth-Long- 
fellow house to the last, and so you proceed now to the 
comer of Spring Street and High Street, where you 
find much satisfaction in what has been pronounced 
the finest example of the old colonial mansion in the 
city. It has been transformed into the Sweat Memorial 
and is the home of the Portland Art Society. It was 
called the Wingate house until Colonel Sweat piu"chased 
it. Built soon after the Revolution, there were many 
stately assembHes within its walls while General 
Joshua Wingate occupied it. The proportions of the 
structure are excellent, and there is a manifest dignity 
about it that well befits its age. After having been the 
home of Mr. L. M. D. Sweat for many years, it came 
into the hands of the Art Society, through the will of 
Colonel Sweat's widow. It is to be kept without any 
exterior changes, and the hall and several of the rooms 
also are to remain unaltered. The fireproof exhibition 
gallery or rotunda has been erected as an annex at 
the side and rear of the mansion. 

Now go to Congress Square, the center of the 
activities of the city, near where are the old First 
Parish or Unitarian Church, the Chad wick mansion, 
and the home of the poet whose name is most 
intimately associated with Portland. The church, 
whose spire you sighted over the tops of the buildings 
as you entered the square, stands in the midst of a 



310 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

big lawn, enclosed by an iron fence. The walls are 
of undressed granite. The interior is large and roomy, 
with a gallery supported by pillars surrounding three 
sides, and six rows of narrow straight pews with doors. 
There are tablets on the walls, and altogether the effect 
is that of restfulness and dignity. 

The parish has a fine history, with some amusing 
episodes. It was established in 1718 and the present 
church was built in 1825 upon the site of an older 
structure. Few churches have a more remarkable 
record in the matter of long pastorates. There were 
but four pastors between 1727 and 1864. Nor were 
there in that long period any vacancies. " Parson 
Smith '* was the incumbent for sixty-seven years. 
During the greater part of the eighteenth century 
this minister, the Rev. Thomas Smith, was the most 
prominent man in the town. For a long time he was 
the only doctor. Also he was the annalist of early 
Portland, and his journal is a mine of information, full 
of quaint observations. 

In 1726 the town voted to supply " Rev. Mr. Smith 
with firewood during his continuance as our minister." 
And he " continued " for two- thirds of a century. 
However, wood was cheaper then than it is now. It 
was the custom in that day during prayer for all the 
people to stand and turn up the broad seats that they 
might lean forward during the exercise. At the annual 
fast in 1750, says the pastor in his diary, he " had 
uncommon assistance, was an hour in each of the 



PORTLAND 311 

prayers." At the " Amen," we are told by an historian, 
all the seats went down with a bang. 

The second pastor, the Rev. Samuel Deane, bought a 
three-acre lot next to the church, and built thereon 
a two-story hip-roofed house. Later it was much 
altered and modernized, and long was the residence 
of Samuel Chadwick. Thus it came to be known as 
the Chadwick house. It has been moved back from 
its old place on the street and now stands almost in 
the rear of a business block. However, it has a clear 
space in front of it to the street, and presents a hand- 
some appearance with its two stories of columns, 
its pediments and its balustraded roof. Originally 
it had some thirty rooms. 

The " Old Jerusalem " meeting-house of the First 
Parish was taken down to make way for the present 
church. Longfellow was a boy of seventeen in college 
when in 1824 he wrote a poem in protest against the 
destruction of the ancient building. But few of the 
readers of the " household poet " are familiar with this 
early production. This is the first of the eight stanzas : 

" Our Fathers' Temple! o'er thy form 

In peace time's holy twilight falls; 
Yet heavenly light glows pure and warm 

Around thy venerable walls : 
The shades of years have mellow 'd long 

But not obscur'd that light of God, 
Though they that placed thee here shall throng 

No more the courts where once they trod." 



312 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

As you pass the Preble House, one of the hotels of 
the city, you may be reminded that in the central por- 
tion are included the walls of the old Preble home. For 
the Prebles came from Portland, and a grandson of 
the Commodore Edward Preble who built the house 
in 1807 was an officer on the Kearsarge when the great 
duel with the Alabama was fought off the harbor of 
Cherbourg. 

And now that the pilgrim has traversed some 
part of Portland he ought to be reminded of the judg- 
ment penned by the Autocrat in the passage from 
Elsie Venner about the " three towns each with a Port 
in its name," and a portion of which has been quoted 
heretofore. In that passage he had this to say with 
definite reference to the city which you are view- 
ing: 

" As to the last of the three Ports or Portland, it is getting too 
prosperous to be as attractive as its less northerly neighbors. 
Meant for a fine old town, to ripen like a Cheshire cheese within 
its walls of ancient rind, burrowed with crooked alleys and 
mottled with venerable mould, it seems likely to sacrifice its 
mellow future to a vulgar material prosperity. Still it remains 
invested with many of its old charms, as yet, and will forfeit 
its place among this admirable trio only when it gets a hotel 
with unequivocal marks of having been buHt and organized 
in the present century." 

The judgment of the Autocrat may not necessarily 
be your judgment, save as to the obvious fact that 
this city is far the most modernized of the cities and 




TJie Wadstvortli-LongfcUo'i.v House, Portland 



PORTLAND 313 

villages which have made up the itinerary of your 
tours among New England's historic haunts. 

Now — the Wadsworth-Longfellow house ! It has 
been pronounced by the librarian of the Maine His- 
torical Society " the most historical house in Maine," 
and he said also: " It has been the home of at 
least eight persons who would make fame for any 
house by their meritorious services or public benefac- 
tions." It was the home of the parents and the grand- 
parents of the poet Longfellow, and he spent his own 
early years there and wrote there some of his best 
known poems. His younger sister, Anne Longfellow 
Pierce, lived in the house more than eighty-seven 
years and donated it to the Maine Historical Society. 
This society has put up a library building at the rear 
of the old house, and keeps the home itself in order as a 
shrine and a memorial of the past. 

Stand a while in front of the building. It was the 
first brick house to be built in Portland. The bricks 
were brought from Philadelphia by General Peleg 
Wadsworth, the father of the mother of the poet. He 
built it first of two stories in 1785 and 1786, and the 
third story was added in 18 15. It is plain, almost 
severe in aspect, a rectangular solid, devoid of orna- 
mentation save for the Ionic portico over the entrance 
in the middle of the front, and the little side hall, 
added to give a separate entrance to the room used 
as a law office by the father of the poet. There are two 
tall chimneys housed in each of the side walls and 



314 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

rearing their stacks high above the roof. In the old 
days these drained the smoke from the eight fireplaces 
in which some thirty cords of wood were burned in a 
winter. Three tall elms stand in the yard just behind 
the iron fence. 

As you pass between the high brick gate posts, you 
note the heavy brass knocker and enter a hall running 
through the house, turning to the left into the first 
of the series of sixteen rooms which are kept open for 
the inspection of the public. The windows have heavy 
paneled wooden shutters, and the walls are thick 
enough to provide wide window- seats. The custodians 
tell you at once that this parlor was the largest in 
Portland when the house was built, and that it held 
the first piano which was brought to the town. 

It was in this room that Stephen Longfellow married 
Zilpah Wadsworth on the first day of the year 1804. 
It had been the home of the poet's mother from child- 
hood. In this room also two of the poet's sisters were 
married, Anne, who became Mrs. Pierce, and Mary, 
who married James Greenleaf and who died in Cam- 
bridge in 1902. 

Back of the parlor is the " Den " or old dining-room. 
The floor is bare, except for some rugs of rag carpet, 
the grate is open, with Longfellow's motto over it on 
the mantel — " Non Clamor, Sed Amor," Not Loud- 
ness, but Love. Various interesting souvenirs are on 
the walls. Here is the first draft of the address Stephen 
Longfellow made in welcoming Lafayette to Portland 



PORTLAND 315 

in 1825. The reply of the visitor also is in the room. 
But more curious is the bill rendered by the family 
doctor for services when the poet was bom. It is m a 
frame and you smile as you read: 

" 1807, Feb., for attendg on Mrs. L. . . • $5-oo-" 

Every visitor will be likely to stand for a long time 
before the mahogany desk between the two wmdows 
commanding a view of the garden. It is plam, small, 
old-fashioned. The visitors' register now rests upon it. 
It was at this desk, standing where it now stands, 
that The Rainy Day was written. In plain view ]ust 
outside is the " Rainy Day vine." Once it was large 
enough to cover a big trellis. A bit of the original vme, 
two inches through, is over the mantel. 

« The day is cold, and dark, and dreary; 
It rains, and the wind is never weary; 

The vine still clings to the mouldering waU, 
But at every gust the dead leaves fall. 
And the day is dark and dreary." 

You are struck as you pass from room to room by 
the great number of memorials and furnishings and 
reUcs which the house contains, and which belonged 
to the Wadsworths and the Longfellows, or were di- 
rectly associated with their every-day life or with im- 
portant incidents in their lives. Perhaps, after all, 
that statement you were inclined to question a little 
may have been warranted; that in this house is found 



316 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

" the best collection of the belongings of an author's 
family on exhibition in the world." 
• There are portraits, many of them in oil, on the walls, 
and silhouettes; documents in great numbers, man- 
uscripts, books, deeds, wills and letters; the poet's 
board bills at Brunswick and his term bills at Bowdoin 
College are framed; a complete set of silhouettes 
of "the famous Bowdoin class of 1825;" household 
utensils in great variety; costumes of the mother and 
sisters of the poet; and a large collection of furniture. 
The house is most unusual, almost unique, in that 
these furnishings were the property of the families 
that occupied it. They are not the gifts of the members 
of a patriotic society, gathered in many places, but 
they were used in this house by the famous persons 
who had their home here. The only " jar " is caused 
by the labels. These are large and they seem perhaps 
a little obtrusive. But then this is a public place which 
has been visited by many thousands, and the labels 
are a vast help to the caretakers who have the exhibits 
in charge. 

You glance at the kitchen and then enter the room 
at the front across from the parlor. This was the living- 
room. Over there by the window is the favorite big 
chair in which Longfellow used to loimge. There is a 
beautiful fireplace with brass andirons. This room 
was used for ten years by Stephen Longfellow as a 
law office, and it was here that his poet son read legal 
tomes for a time. Samuel Longfellow, the poet's 



PORTLAND 317 

brother, wrote of the home life which this room wit- 
nessed: 

" In the evenings there were lessons to be learned, and the 
children opened their satchels and gathered their books and 
slates round the table in the family sitting-room. Studies over, 
there would be games till bed-time. . . . When bed-time came 
it was hard to leave the warm fire to go up into the unwarmed 
bedrooms; still harder the next morning to get up out of the 
comfortable feather-beds and break the ice in the pitchers for 
washing. But hardship made hardihood." 

The little room beyond was added to the house in 
1815 to make a separate entrance to the office. But 
in 1828 it was transformed into a china closet. In 
1829 the young poet wrote his sister from Germany: 
" No soft poetic ray has irradiated my heart since the 
Goths and Vandals crossed the Rubicon of the front 
entry and turned the sanctum sanctorum of the ' Little 
Room ' into a china closet." 

Climb the stairs to the second story and you find 
"Mother's Room," "Mrs. Pierce's Room," "the 
Children's Room," and the " Guest Room." Each 
contains a collection of family properties that would 
make in themselves a good-sized museum. In 
" Mother's Room " the poet's mother died. Beautifully 
he wrote of his loss in 1851 : 

" In the chamber in which I last took leave of her lay my 
mother, to welcome and take leave of me no more. I sat all 
that night alone with her, without terror, almost without sor- 



318 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

row, so tranquil had been her death. A sense of peace came over 
me as if there had been no shock or jar in nature, but a harmo- 
nious close to a long Ufe." 

The old cradle in which the mother rocked and 
lullabied this boy to sleep is on this floor. There are 
canopied beds here, and, what the lady guides do not 
permit the visitor to miss, around the mantel is hung 
a " Yankee Doodle drapery." One looks with amused 
interest at the scenes stamped upon it, illustrating the 
story of the fabled original of the old song. There 
are various mementoes of the Boxer and Enterprise 
combat in this room. In a case is a flag said to be the 
second oldest American flag in existence. It was loaned 
by Charles F. Quincy of Chicago, one of the few fur- 
nishings which do not seem to have direct association 
with the house. The flag measures about eighteen 
feet by eleven feet. Pictures on the walls show scenes 
in the war with Tripoli. They are to be contemplated 
with recollection of the heroism of the poet's name- 
sake, Lieutenant Henry Wadsworth, who was on board 
the Intrepid that night when under Captain Somers 
she was sent into the harbor upon her desperate errand. 
Indeed, it was from this house that the two boys, the 
lieutenant and his brother. Midshipman Alexander 
Wadsworth, went off to Tripoli with Commodore Preble. 
But after the lurid light had shown the watchers on the 
Constitution the whole harbor — forts, ships, castle 
and town — and their ears had' been stunned by the 
terrific explosion, no word ever came from the men 



PORTLAND 319 

who had ventured into the bay amid their foes. 
" Harry " Wadsworth was but nineteen when he died. 

Up the worn stairs to the third floor you mount. 
A placard tells you that these stairs the poet climbed 
when he was eight years old and that at seventy-four, 
in 1 88 1, when he last visited the house, he climbed them 
once more and slept in his old room. Yes, this is the 
room where " the boys " slept. There is the very 
trundle bed. The windows look out upon the garden 
and the western skies. Very likely in this room Long- 
fellow wrote his first poem. The casings of the windows 
are covered with the scribblings of the children. 

Then in the next room Longfellow slept when a 
young man. There are seven rooms in all on this floor. 
From the front, in the old days, the harbor could be 
seen and the islands, and from these windows the boys 
used to gaze upon the " beauty and mystery of the 
ships " and the ** islands that were the Hesperides." 
But what catches the eye is not the small view now 
available, but a leather-covered, brass-nail-studded, 
rectangular box, measuring some two-and-a-half feet 
by a foot and a half with a depth of a trifle more than 
one foot. That's the " trunk " which the young man 
took with him when he made his first voyage to Europe 
in 1826. A good-sized suit-case would hold more now- 
adays. 

Down the worn stairs you come again. You do not 
wish to talk. Your memory is busy. This is a hallowed 
.spot. The poems you learned years ago are coming 



320 HISTORIC SUMMER HAUNTS 

back to you. Never mind about the " place " that 
may be assigned to the poet by the critics. He is the 
" household poet," and the people love him. You are 
through with sightseeing in Portland. It is the city 
of Longfellow, and you will always see it through hi& 
writings. 



INDEX 



Adams, Abigail, 54/-, 63, 72; her 
marriage, S9, 62, 70; in the White 
House, 60; in France, 61; quoted, 

56. 
Adams, Abigail Brooks, 73. 
Adams, Charles Francis, 70, 73. 
Adams, Charles Francis, the 

younger, 55, 58, 71. 
Adams, Henry, tomb of, 66. 
Adams, John, 68, 70, 71/., 154, 291; 

boyhood of, 63; in Continental 

Congress, 55. 
Adams, John Quincy, 54 /., 64, 68, 

72, 239. 
Adams, Louisa Catherine, 68, 72. 
Adams, Samuel, 90, 92, 158. 
Agassiz, Louis, 107. 
Alabama, the, 312. 
Alcott, Amos Bronson, in, 122; 

quoted, 103, 113. 
Alcott Family, Graves of, 107. 
Alcott, Loiiisa May, her grave, 108; 

house in which LitUe Women was 

written, 115; her life in Concord, 

95, 107, 113, 119; quoted, 114 /., 

116. 
Alcott, May, 95, 114. 
Alden, John, ss, 43. 44, 45- 
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, boyhood 

of, 283; quoted, 269, 276, 286, 

29S- 

Aldrich Memorial, the, in Ports- 
mouth, 283. 

Alliance, the, 246. 

Allston, Washington, 10, 18. 



Amesbury, Whittier's home in, 228. 
Anne, the, 48, 50. 
Archer, the, 306. 
Ariel, the, 246. 

Arnold, Colonel Benedict, 246, 254. 
Arnold, Governor Benedict, 9. 
Atlantic, the, 193. 
Baptists, in Newport, 30. 
Barnard, Rev. John, 146. 
Baron, Dr. Francis le, the " Name- 
less Nobleman," 52, 53. 
Bass, Rev. Edward, 248. 
Bates, Catherine Fiske, quoted, i. 
Berkeley, Bishop George, 4, 276; 
his arrival at Newport, 28; 
scheme for a college in Bermuda, 
29; author of " Westward the 
course of Empire takes its way," 
28; quoted, 28. 
Bishop, Bridget, 185; warrant for 

her death as a witch, 189. 
Blynman, Rev. Richard, 176. 
Boardman, Captain Offin, 246, 265. 
Bon Hemme Richard, the, 246. 
Bowditch, Nathaniel, 209. 
Boxer, the, 303, 307, 318. 
Bradford, Dorothy, 34, 50. 
Bradford, William, n, 34, 41, 45/., 

SO. 
Bray, Evelina, 158; see Whittier. 
Breck, Samuel, quoted, 242. 
Brenton, Jahleel, 27. 
Brenton, William, 3. 
Brewster, William, 45, 
Browne, Rev. Arthur, 279, 298. 



322 



INDEX 



Bull, Ephraim Wales, 121. 
Bull, Governor Henry, 18. 
Bull, Mary, 18. 
Bull, Ole, 130, 131. 
Burr, Aaron, 76, 246. 
Burroughs, Rev. Charles, 289. 
Burroughs, Rev. George, 187. 
Bynner, Edwin Lasseter, quoted, 

Caleb Cushing, the, 305. 

Callendar, Rev. John, 14. 

Cape Ann, 173 ff. 

Caravan, the, 213. 

Carpenter, Miss Alice, 50. 

Carver, Governor John, 44, 48; his 
daughter, 44. 

Cato, Sewall's Prelude to Addison's, 
294. 

Chadwick, Rev. John White, quoted, 
134, 148. 

Chadwick, Samuel, 311. 

Champlain, Samuel de, 175. 

Champlin, Christopher Grant, 20. 

Champlin, Peggy, 5, i8, 24. 

Channing, William E., 10. 

Chase, Salmon P., 267. 

Chastellux, Chevalier de, 20, 288; 
quoted, 244. 

Chesapeake, the, 155. 

Chilton, Mary, 39. 

Clarke, Rev. Jonas, 90/. 

Clinton, Sir George, 30. 

Coddington, William, 30. 

Coffin, Joshua, 262. 

Collins, Henry, 14. 
Concord, 93-122; bridge and 
battleground, 98 /.; the Hillside 
Chapel, 94, 114, 115; the Unita- 
rian Church, 96; Emerson's 
house, 93, no f.; the Concord 
grape, 121; library, no; Old 
Manse, 95, 103 /.; Orchard 
House, 93, 112 f.; Sleepy Hollow 



Cemetery, 105 /., 119; the 
Wright Tavern, 96 /.; Thoreau's 
birthplace and place of death, 
119; Walden Pond, 95, 120; the 
Wayside, 93, 116 ff. 

Concord River, 93, 103. 

Congress, Provincial, at Concord, 96. 

Constitution, the, 155, 318. 

Cooper, J. Fenimore, 5. 

Corey, Giles, 185, 187, 190. 

Corwin, Judge Jonathan, 184, 185. 

" Countess, the," of Whittier's 
poem, 218, 221, 228. 

Curtis, George William, quoted, 2, 
III. 

Cushing, Caleb, 249, 266. 

Cutts, Mehitabel, 277. 

Dalton, Gloster, a slave, 173. 

Dalton, Tristram, 242. 

Davenport, Captain William, 241. 

Davis, Jefferson, 302. 

Dawes, William, ride of, 89. 

Deane, Rev. Samuel, 311. 

Deer Island, 218, 241. 

Derby, Elias Hasket, 193, 211, 
214. 

Dexter, " Lord " Timothy, 239, 244, 
258/. 

Dexter Mansion at Newburyport, 
258. 

" Dorothy Q.," see Quincy, Doro- 
thy. 

" Dorothy Q." house, the, 75. 

Duston, Hannah, 225, 227. 

Edrehi, Israel, 130. 

Ellery, Martha Redwood, 20. 

Emerson, Charles, 108. 

Emerson, Miss Ellen, m. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo,94, 107, 122, 
209, 232; ancestry, 106; grave, 
106; home in Concord, 93, no; 
marriage, 47; quoted, 93, 98, 
104, 122. 



INDEX 



323 



Emerson, the Rev. William, 105, 
109; describes Battle of Concord, 
lOI /. 

Endicott, John, at Merry Mount,58. 

Enterprise, the, 303, 307, 318. 

Essex, the, 155. 

Falcon, the, 176. 

Faunce, Elder Thomas, 39, 40; his 
epitaph, 51. 

Faxon, Henry H., 64. 

" Federal Street," the tune, 211. 

Fersen, Count Axel von, 5, 20, 24. 

Fields, Mrs. Annie, quoted, 234. 

Fields, James T., 107, 124, 201/., 
232. 

Fountain Inn at Marblehead, 142. 

Frankland, Sir Harry, 76, 141 ff. 

Friends, the, 247. 

Froude, James Anthony, quoted, 
181/. 

Fuller, Margaret, 119. 

Game Cock, the, 246. 

Garrison, William Lloyd, 232, 239; 
birth and early life in Newbury- 
port, 255; his discovery " of 
Whittier, 256. 

Gas pee, burning of the, 16. 

Gerry, Ebenezer, 140. 

Gerry, Elbridge, 80, 148, 155, 158, 
275, 288. 

Gerrymander, origin of, 149. 

Gibbons, Grinling, 275. 

Gloucester, 160-178; East Glouces- 
ter, 167; Eastern Point, 168; the 
First Parish Church, 173; the 
fishingfleet, i6i ^.,177 /.; the har- 
bor, 164; Middle Street, 170; old 
houses, 170/.; St. Ann's Church, 
174; Universalist Church and the 
founding of American Universal- 
ism, 171 /. 
Glover, General John, 152; his 
" amphibious regiment," 153. 



Grand Turk, the, 193. 

Greely, General A. W., 266. 

Greene, General Nathanael, la 

Guerriere, the, 155. 

Hancock-Clarke house at Lexing- 
ton, 89. 

Hancock, Dorothy Quincy, 74, 90. 

Hancock, John, 63, 91, 288, 292; at 
Lexington the night before the 
battle, 90, 92, 158; letters to Dor- 
othy Quincy, 76; marriage, 74/., 
92. 

Hancock, Rev. John, 90, 91. 

Hancock, Mme. Lydia, 92. 

Hancock, Thomas, 91. 

Handy, Major John, 16. 

Haraden, Jonathan, 196. 

Harrington, Caleb, 88. 

Harrington, Jonathan, killed at 
Lexington, 80, 88. 

Harrington, Jonathan, the yoimger, 
81. 

Harrison, Peter, 14. 

Harte, Francis Bret, quoted, 25. 

Haverhill, Whittier's birthplace in, 

2l8. 

Hawthorne, Julian, quoted, 118. 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 129, 187^ 
193,213; grave of, 106; houses in 
Salem associated with, 198; life 
in the Old Manse at Concord, 104; 
in the Wayside at Concord, 116; 
marriage with Sophia A. Peabody, 
200; reveals manuscript of The 
Scarlet Letter, 201; quoted, 80, 
103, 112, 116, 182, 190, 196, 198, 
200; see also allusions in Concord 
and Salem chapters. 

Hazard, Benjamin, 18. 

Hesperus, wreck, 163. 

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 
249; quoted, 3, 21/., 166, 174, 
250. 



324 



INDEX 



Hilton, Martha, and her marriage 

with Gov. Benning Wentworth, 

271, 297, 298. 
Hoar, Charles, 65. 
Hoar, E. R., 65, 108. 
Hoar, Elizabeth, 108. 
Hoar, George F., 65. 
Hoar, Joanna, 65. 
Hoar, John, 65. 
Hoar, Margery, 65. 
Hoar, Samuel, 108. 
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 107; and 

" Dorothy Q.," 77^.; quoted, 78, 

142/., 234, 237, 312. 
Holyoke, Rev. Edward, 146. 
Holyoke, Dr. Edward A., 209. 
Hooper, " King " Robert, 149. 
Hope, the, 154. 
House of Seven Gables, 203. 
Hovey, Rev. Horace C, 254. 
Howe, Lyman, 127. 
Howells, William Dean, 89, 285; 

quoted, 79. 
Hunter, Mrs. Deborah, 20. 
Hunter, William, 21. 
Hutchinson, Anne, 30. 
Hutton, Laurence, 285. 
Intrepid, the, 318. 
Ireson, Skipper, xso_ff. 
Irving, Sir Henry, 285. 
Isles of Shoals, 272, 273. 
Jack, John, curious epitaph, 109. 
Jews, the, of Newport, 10 Jff. 
Jones, John Paul, 196, 273. 
Judson, Adoniram, 47, 213. 
Kearsarge, the, 272, 312. 
Kellogg, Rev. Elijah, 303. 
King, Charles B., 14. 
King, Rufus, 239. 
King, Samuel, 18. 
King, Thomas Starr, 232. 
Ladd, Alexander, 276. 
Ladd house in Portsmouth, 275. 



Lafayette, Marquis de, 77, 126, 210, 
243, 288. 

Lander, General F. W., 209. 

Langdon, Governor, 288. 

Langdon house in Portsmouth, 288. 

Larcom, Lucy, 232; quoted, 168. 

Lauzun, Duke de, 20, 24. 

Lawton, Polly, 5, 15. 

Lear, Tobias, 280. 

Lee, Colonel Jeremiah, 80, 156, 244. 

Lee mansion at Marblehead, 156. 

Lewis, Ida, 6, 32. 

Lexington, 79-92; the old Belfry, 
79, 86; the cemetery, 88; the 
FoUen Church, 80; the Green, 
79, 84 ff.; the Hancock-Clarke 
house, 89 f; the Hancock 
Church, 89; library, 89; the 
Marrett-Munroe house, 88; mon- 
ument on the Green, 87; Parker 
monument, 79, 86; the Buck- 
man Tavern, 88; the Munroe 
Tavern, 81 ^. 

Lexington, Battle of, 81 Jf. 

Light Horse, the, 193. 

Lisle, Lady Alice, daughter of, 66. 

Livermore, Harriet, 226. 

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 34, 
106, 205, 232, 301.307,311,315; 
at the Wayside Inn, 124; birth- 
place of, 308; boyhood home in 
Portland, 313; quoted, 9, 13, 43, 
84, 107, 123, 128, 159, 163, 271, 
296, 302, 307, 311, 315, 317. 

Longfellow house in Portland, see 
Wadsworth-Longfellow house. 

Longfellow, Mary (Mrs. Greenleaf), 

314- 

Longfellow, Samuel, quoted, 317. 

Longfellow, Stephen, 314, 316. 

Lowell, James Russell, 107, 243, 266. 

Lunt Brothers, Henry, Ezra, Cut- 
ting, and Daniel, 246, 250. 



mDEX 



325 



Malbone, Edward G., i8. 
Marblehead, 133-159; Abbot Hall, 
136, 138, 158; birthplace of El- 
bridge Gerry, 148; house of Eve- 
lina Bray, 158; Catholic Church, 
158; dialect, 135; Fountain Inn, 
142; Glover house, 152; the har- 
bor, 136 f.; Hooper mansion, 
149; in the Wars with England, 
153 f.; Ireson house, 150; Lee 
mansion, 156 Jf.; the Neck, 138; 
the Old Brig, 144; Old Burying 
Hill, 135, 140, 154; old North 
Church, 138, 145; Old Powder 
House, 152; St. Michael's Church, 
147; Town Hall, 134, 139. 

Margaret, the, 193. 

Mason, Captain John, 278. 

Massasoit, 36, 41. 

Mayflower, the, 33 J'., 39. 

Merry Mount, the May Day revels 
there, 57, 58. 

Messenger, the, 194. 

Mills, Samuel J., 250. 

Moffat, Katherine, her proposal, 
280. 

Moffatt, Samuel, 276. 

Monti, Luigi, 130. 

More, Captain Richard, 201. 

Morgan, Daniel, 263. 

Mossum, Rev. David, 148. 

Mugford, Captain James, 153. 

Mullins, Priscilla, 43 /. 

Murray, Rev. John, 170 _ff. 

Murray, Rev. John (of Newbury- 
port), 254. 

Musketaquid, see Concord River. 

Newburyport, 237-268; CoflSn 
house, 262; Dalton Club, 242; 
Deer Island, 241; the Timothy 
Dexter house, 258 ff.; Garrison's 
birthplace, 255; High Street, 238, 
240, 258; Ilsley house, 262; in 



the Wars with England, 239, 245; 
"Joppa," 257; library, 243; the 
Mall and the pond, 257/.; Noyes 
house, 265; Old South Church, 
239, 250 Jf.; St. Paul's Church, 
247 /•; Spencer-Pierce house, 
263 ./•; Toppan house, 262; 
Unitarian church, 249; Wolfe 
Tavern, 241. 
Newport, City of, 1-32; Baptist 
church, 14 /.; Boss house, 22; 
Bridge Street, 22; the British oc- 
cupation, 30/.; Bull house, 18/.; 
Champlin mansion, 20; Channing 
Church and statue, 10; Chan- 
ning's birthplace, 10; Church 
Street, 26; Colonial fame, i jf.; 
commerce, 2, 5; Congress Street, 
15; the Cowley assembly rooms, 5; 
the French occupation, 4, 21, 
^Sff-)' Gibbs mansion, 9; Histor- 
ical Society building, 14; Hunter 
house, 20, 25; Jews of the city, 
10 ff-> Jewish cemetery, 12 /.; 
Jews' Sjmagogue, 10 /.; Long 
Wharf, 4, 31 /.; the Mall, 15; 
Marlborough Square, 17; Nich- 
olls house, 17; Old City Hall, 31; 
Old Jail, 17; Old Mill, 3, 7/.; Old 
State House, 5, 15/.; the Parade, 
15; the Point, 4, 20 jf.; Portrait 
Collection, 14; Prescott's head- 
quarters, 30; Redwood Library, 2, 
10, 14; Southwick house, 22; 
White Horse Tavern, 17; Thames 
Street, 5, 20, 24 /., 31; Touro 
Park, 10; Trinity Church, 26 _^.; 
Vernon house, 19 /.; Wanton 
house, 17; Washington Street, 20, 
22; Washington Square, 15; 
Whitehall, 29. 
Newport, the Island, i, 6. 
Nicholls, Governor Jonathan, 21. 



326 



INDEX 



" Nobleman, the Nameless," see 
Baron, Dr. Francis le. 

Noyes, Rev. James, 266. 

Nurse, Rebecca, examined for witch- 
craft, 188. 

Oak Knoll, Danvers, 235. 

Occupation, British, of Newport, 

30,31- 
Occupation, French, of Newport, 4, 

21, 23/. 
Old Manse at Concord, 95, 103. 
Old South Church at Newburyport, 

239, 250. 
Oliver, General Henry K., 210. 
Orchard House at Concord, 93, 112. 
Orne, Colonel Azor, 80, 150, 158. 
Ours, poem, quoted, 236. • 
Paine, Robert Treat, 239. 
Palfrey, John G., 35; quoted, 54. 
Parker, Captain, at the Battle of 

Lexington, 85. 
Parkman, Francis, 295. 
Parsons, Rev. Jonathan, 251, 254. 
Parsons, Thomas W., quoted, 127, 

129, 132. 
" Partington, Mrs. Ruth," 294. 
Parton, James, quoted, 246. 
Peabody, George, 208/., 305. 
Peabody, Sophia Amelia, see Haw- 
thorne. 
Peaslee, Mary, 226. 
Pepperell, Sir William, 273, 279. 
Perry, Matthew Calbraith, 10, 22. 
Perry, Oliver Hazard, 5, 16, 20, 22, 

27. 
Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 168. 
Philippe, Louis, 289. 
Pickard, Samuel T., 229, 232. 
Pierce, Anne Longfellow, 313, 314. 
Pierce, Franklin, 107, 265. 
Pierpont, John, quoted, $3, loi. 
Pilgrims, only contemporaneous 

gravestone, 201. 



Pitcher, Moll, 140, 144. 

Plymouth, 33-53; Bradford's mon- 
ument, 49; Burial Hill, 3$, 40, 
42, 48^.; Church of the Pilgrim- 
age, 42; Cole's Hill, 35, 38; the 
Common House, 40; epitaphs, 
48 ff.; excursionists " doing the 
town," 36 Jf.; First Parish 
Church, 42; Judson house, 47; 
Leyden Street, 34, 40/.; Pilgrim 
Hall, 38, 43, 45 /.; Pilgrim Monu- 
ment, 46/.; Plymouth Rock, 33, 
37 ff.; Standish monument in 
Duxbury, 35; Town Brook, 36, 
40; town house, 42; Town 
Square, 41; Warren house, 47; 
Winslow house, 47. 

Poore, Ben: Perley, 266. 

Portland, 299-320; Casco Bay, 300, 
302; Chadwick house, 311; Con- 
gress Square, 309; Congress 
Street, 300; Eastern Cemetery, 
307; fire of 1866, 306; First Par- 
ish Church, 309 J'.; in the Civil 
War, 305; in the Wars with Eng- 
land, 303 /.; India Street, 308; 
Longfellow's birthplace, 308; Ob- 
servatory, 299; Preble house, 312; 
T. B. Reed's birthplace, 308; 
Sweat Memorial, 309; Wads- 
worth-Longfellow house, 313 ff. 

Portsmouth, 269-298; the T. B. 
Aldrich house, 283 ff.; the Athe- 
naeum, 271, 293; Ceres Street, 
273; Earl of Halifax Tavern, 271, 
287; Ladd house, 275 jf.; Lang- 
don house, 288; Market Square, 
273; Odiome's Point, 273; Old 
North Manse, 289; Pitt Tavern, 
287; Pleasant Street, 288; St. 
John's Church, 271, 274, 278^.; 
Shillaber house, 294; Warner 
house, 282; Wendell house, 292; 



INDEX 



327 



the Wentworth houses, 290 Jf.; 
Banning Wentworth mansion, 
295^.; the wharves, 273/. 

Preble, Commodore Edward, 312, 
318. 

Prescott, General, 30/. 

Prescott, William Hickling, 210. 

Proctor, Edna Dean, quoted, 131. 

Quakers in Newport, 4, 30. 

Quakers, persecuted in Salem, 191. 

Quincy, 54-78; birthplaces, of 
John and J. Q. Adams, 58 jff.; 
Adams Academy, 71; Adams 
mansion, " house of the golden 
weddings," 60, 72; Adams tab- 
lets, 69 /.; Adams tombs, 67 f.; 
Cairn on Perm's Hill, 54 Jf.; ceme- 
tery, 65; " Dorothy Q." house, 
73 Jf.; Merry Moimt, 57; Mount 
WoUaston, 58; " the Stone Tem- 
ple," 67 ;ff.; Town Hall, 64; Vas- 
sall house, see Adams mansion; 
Woodward Institute, 71. 

Quincy, Abigail, 67. 

Quincy, Dorothy (" Dorothy Q."), 

6S, 74/- 
Quincy, Edmxmd, 67. 
Quincy, Hannah, 63. 
Quincy, Colonel John, 67, 70. 
Rajah, the, 193. 
Ranger, the, 273. 
Rasieres, Isaac de, comments on 

Plymouth, 41. 
Redwood, Abraham, 14, 20. 
Redwood, William, 22. 
Reed, Thomas B., 308. 
Revere, Paul, bells made by, 42, 

250, 279; ride of, 79, 84, 90, 92. 
Richardson, Charles F., quoted, 

179. 
Ripley, Rev. Ezra, 105, no. 
Robbins, Rev. Chandler, 52. 
Robinson, Capt. Andrew, 164. 



Robinson sisters of Newport, their 
romance, 17, 18, 21, 22. 

Rochambeau, Coimt de, 19 J^., 23, 
24. 

Rose, the, 153. 

Rousselet, Nicholas, his wooing, 280. 

St. John's Church at Portsmouth, 
271, 274, 278. 

St. Michael's Church at Marble- 
head, 147. 

St. Paul's Church at Newburyport, 
247. 

Salem, 179-215; architecture, 183, 
2 1 o Jf .; Assembly Hall ,210; Char- 
ter Street Cemetery, 201; Chest- 
nut Street, 211; churches, 212/.; 
Custom. House, 196 /.; Derby 
Street, 181, 191 /.; Derby Wharf, 
193; Essex Institute, 205, 213, 
215; Essex Street, 182; Federal 
Street, 210; Gallows Hill, 190; 
Hamilton Hall, 183, 212; the 
eight Hawthorne houses, 198 f.; 
House of the Seven Gables, 203 f.; 
in the Wars with England, 195 /.; 
India Wharf, 193^ Narbonne 
house, 214; other houses, 211/., 
214; Peabody Academy of Sci- 
ence, 206; Peabody house, 200; 
Pickering house, 214; Pierce- 
Nichols house, 210; Quaker 
meeting-house, 213; ships and 
sailors, 181 /., 192 f.; Ward 
house, 213; Washington Square, 
211; witchcraft, 185 f.; witch 
house, 183 f. 

Saltonstall, Nathaniel, 225. 

Saltonstall, Judge Richard, 224. 

Sampson, Deborah, 52. 

Sanborn, Frank B., 122. 

Saranac, the, 272. 

Schooner, the, origin of name, 
164. 



328 



INDEX 



Seabury, Rev. Samuel, first Ameri- 
can bishop, 27. 
Segur, Comte de, 5, 15. 
Sewall, Jonathan Mitchell, quoted, 

293- 
Sewall, Judge Samuel, 188; quoted, 

267. 
Shannon, the, 155. 
Smith, Captain John, 175; quoted, 

300. 
Smith, Rev. S. F., quoted, 231. 
Smith, Rev. Thomas, 310. 
Snow-Bound, scene of the poem, 220. 
Southworth, Mrs. Alice, 50. 
Spencer-Pierce " Old Stone " house 

at Newburyport, 263. 
Spofford, Harriet Prescott, 218, 241, 

257- 
Spring, Rev. Samuel, 254. 
Squanto, 57. 
Standish, Barbara, 45. 
Standish, Lora, 48. 
Standish, Myles, zi /•, 36, 43» 4S» 

48,57/- 
Standish, Rose, 34. 
Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 

quoted, 160. . 
Stevens, Judith, 170. 
Stiles, Rev. Ezra, 16. 
Story, Dr. Elisha, 150. 
Story, Judge Joseph, 150. 
Story, William Wetmore, quoted, 

179, 207. 
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 303; quoted, 

6. 
Stuart, Gilbert, 15/. 
Sturge, Joseph, 228, 232. 
Surriage, Agnes, 76, 141 ff. 
Sweat, L. M. D., 309. 
Swift, Dean Jonathan, 29. 
Tacony, the, 305. 
Tallant, Hugh, 217, 224. 
Tavern, Black Horse, 80, 158. 



Tavern, the Buckman, 88. 

Tavern, the Earl of Halifax, 271. 

Tavern, the Munroe, 81. 

Tavern, the Pitt, 287. 

Tavern, the Wolfe, 241. 

Tavern, the Wright, 96. 

Tennyson, Alfred, quoted, 93. 

Temay, Admiral de, $, 21, 25. 

Thaxter, Celia, 272. 

Thompson, Benjamin, Count Rum- 
ford, 209. 

Thoreau Family, graves of, 107. 

Thoreau, Henry D., 94/., no, 120; 
see Concord. 

Tingley, Mrs. Katherine, 258. 

Touro, Abraham, 11, 13. 

Touro, Rev. Isaac, 11. 

Touro, Judah, 10, 11, 13^. 

Tracy, John, 243/., 244. 

Tracy, Nathaniel, 239, 243. 

Tracy, Patrick, 243. 

Trinity Church at Newport, 26. 

" Twain, Mark " (Samuel L. Clem- 
ens), 285. 

Universalist Church at Gloucester 
and founding of American Univer- 
salism, 171. 

" Vanessa," Swift's, 29. 

Vassall House in Quincy, 60, 72. 

Vernon, Thomas, 19. 

Vernon, William, 19. 

Very, Rev. Jones, 209. 

Wadsworth, Midshipman Alexan- 
der, 318. 

Wadsworth, Lieutenant Henry, 307, 
318. 

Wadsworth - Longfellow house in 

Portland, 313. 
Wadsworth, General Peleg, 313. 
Wadsworth, Zilpah (Mrs. Longfel-- 

low), 314. 
Walden Pond, 95, 120. 
Wales, Henry Ware, 130. 



INDEX 



329 



Wales, Prince of, 304. 
Wanton, Gov. Gideon, 17, 30. 
Wanton, John, 18, 30. 
Wanton, Joseph, Jr., 21. 
Wanton, Mary, 17. 
Ward, General Frederick Towns- 
end, 208. 
Ward, Rev. John, 225. 
Ward, J. Q. A., 10, 261. 
Warner, Jonathan, 282. 
Warner house in Portsmouth, 282. 
Warren, Mercy Otis, 47. 
Washington, George, 16, 23 /., 27, 

97, 148, 210, 243, 250, 280, 288. 
Wasp, the, 246. 
The Wayside, Hawthorne's Concord 

home, 93, 116. 
Wayside Irm, the, 123-132. 
Webster, Daniel, 215, 278, 293. 
Weld, Dr. Elias, 227. 
Wendell house in Portsmouth, 292. 
Wentworth, Governor Benning, 290, 

295; his marriage with Martha 

Hilton, a servant maid, 297. 
Wentworth, Governor John, 289, 

290; his flight, 291; his marriage, 

280, 291. 
Wentworth, Lieut.-Gov. John, 290. 
Wentworth, Mark H., 289, 290. 
Wentworth houses in Portsmouth, 

290; the Benning Wentworth 

mansion, 295. 
Wheelwright, Rev. John, 70. 
Whipple, Edwin P., 107. 
Whipple, General William, 276/. 
White, Captain Joseph, murder trial, 

215. 



White, Peregrine, 46. 

White, Stanford, 288. 

Whitefield, George, 239, 250; death 
at Newburyport, 251; quaint 
letter quoted, 252; theft of bones 
from his coffin, 253. 

Whittier Country, 216/.; the But- 
tonwoods, 224; the Captain's 
Well, 233; Deer Island, 218; first 
house in Haverhill, 225; Friends' 
meeting-house in Amesbury, 234; 
kitchen of Snow-Bound, 221; 
Macy-Colby house, 233; Peaslee 
garrison house, 226; Rocks 
Bridge, 217; Rocks Village, 217, 
227; Spiller garrison house, 225; 
the Sycamores, 217, 224; Whit- 
tier's Amesbury home, 228 ff.; 
Whittier's birthplace, 219 ff. 

Whittier, Elizabeth, 232. 

Whittier, John Greenleaf, 135, 150, 
239, 256, 262; and Evelina Bray, 
158/., 230, 231; quoted, 150 /., 
191, 216/., 220, 223/., 228/., 231, 
235, 237, 252, 301; see also under 
Whittier Country. 

Whittier, Joseph, 225. 

Williams, Roger, 185. 

Wingate, General Joshua, 309. 

Winslow, Edward, 33, 45. 

Winslow, Penelope, 47. 

Witchcraft, see Salem and Bridget 
Bishop. 

Wosson, Peg, the witch, 177. 

Wren, Sir Christopher, influence 
on church architecture, 26, 

212. 



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